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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/what-frack-happening-hailing-major-activist-victories-anti-fracking-movementWhat the Frack Is Happening? Hailing the Major Activist Victories in the Anti-Fracking Movementhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/87964067/0/alternet_fracking~What-the-Frack-Is-Happening-Hailing-the-Major-Activist-Victories-in-the-AntiFracking-Movement

From the aggressive anti-fracking moves in Maryland to a statewide ban in New York, the anti-fracking movement is alive and well.

The nation's first federal regulations on fracking, unveiled by the Obama administration last week, sparked immediate criticism from leading anti-fracking activists.

Americans Against Fracking, a coalition of 250 environmental and liberal groups that includes Greenpeace, 350.org, MoveOn.org, CREDO, Food & Water Watch, Rainforest Action Network and Friends of the Earth, issued a statement characterizing the new rules—meant chiefly to reduce the threat of fracking-related water contamination—as "toothless."

Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, who serves on the Americans Against Fracking advisory board, said that Obama's fracking regulations "are nothing more than a giveaway to the oil and gas industry." The group's goal is a complete fracking ban on federal land, where as many as 100,00 oil and gas wells have been drilled.

The new rules apply only to oil and gas drilling on federal lands, which represent about 25 percent of the national fossil fuel output and only some 10 percent of the nation's fracking. The rules don't apply to drilling on private or state-owned land. Currently, fracking occurs in 22 states.

Since states are responsible for regulating most of the fracking in the U.S., the anti-fracking battlefield—a patchwork of communities around the nation taking a stand to protect their air, water and soil–is understandably a bit fractured. With that in mind, here's a brief look around the country at some recent fracktivist highlights at the state and local level.

February 24. Bolstered by an admission by California state regulators that oil companies are disposing toxic waste into protected aquifers in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, more than 150 environmental and community groups filed a legal petition urging the governor to use his emergency powers to place a moratorium on fracking.

March 20. California state Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) and other lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown urging him to "stop illegal injection into non-exempt aquifers" to protect the state's water from oil waste.

Colorado

February 24. Coloradans Against Fracking activists crashed a state oil and gas task force meeting, launching a campaign for a statewide fracking ban. "Our primary goal is to convince Governor Hickenlooper to ban fracking," said Karen Dike, a member of the new coalition. He can do that with an executive order."

March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal to halt plans by the Bureau of Land Management to open up 36,000 acres of public lands along the Front Range of Colorado to fracking.

"Climate denial at the Interior Department is fueling a fracking rush on our public lands and undermining our nation's efforts to rein in carbon pollution," said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians.

Maryland

March 24. Maryland's House of Delegates passed a bill to ban fracking for three years by a veto-proof 94 to 45. However, it's unclear whether HB 449, currently under review in the state's Senate Committee on Education, Health and Environmental Affairs, has enough support in the Senate to become a law.

March 24. The Senate voted 29 to 17 in favor of a bill holding energy companies financially liable for injury, death or property laws caused by their fracking activities.

Together these measures mark the legislature's most aggressive action to curb fracking in the state.

New Mexico

December 30. The BLM announced it was deferring the issuance of five Navajo allotment parcels for fracking near Chaco Canyon, a World Heritage site, in response to a protest filed by a coalition of environmentalists and watchdog groups demanding a suspension of fracking on public lands in the northwest region of the state.

"Deferring these parcels was the right, and indeed, only legally defensible decision," said Kyle Tisdel, a program director for Western Environmental Law Center (WELC). "Necessary safeguards and analysis must be completed before any further leasing and development of the areas treasured landscapes can continue in compliance with the law."

March 11. A coalition of environmental groups including WELC, WildEarth Guardians and the Navajo organization Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment (Diné CARE) filed suit against the BLM and the U.S. Department of the Interior to prevent fracking from harming Chaco Canyon, the site of numerous ancestral Puebloan ruins and Navajo communities.

New York

December 17. About a month after his re-election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed a statewide ban on fracking, citing health risks. The announcement made New York the second state in the country after Vermont to ban fracking. The decision, which ended years of debate in the Empire State, was by most accounts the biggest environmental story in the United States in 2014, and puts pressure on other states to consider similar bans.

"I've never had anyone say to me, I believe fracking is great," said Cuomo. "Not a single person in those communities. What I get is, I have no alternative but fracking."

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, called the move "a vindication for communities around the country that have been hit hard by unconventional natural gas production."

North Carolina

March 17. On the first day natural gas drilling permits could have been legally accepted in North Carolina, a group of anti-fracking state legislators called for a moratorium.

"We’ve been promised over the last five years that North Carolina would have the nation’s toughest fracking rules, and here we are at zero hour, and we do not have those rules," said Senator Mike Woodard (D-Durham). "The rules are simply insufficient for us to move forward with the issuing of permits."

Ohio

March 18. In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Ohio's normally polarized House of Representatives voted unanimously to ban fracking in state parks. While activists applauded the move, Ohio Sierra Club director Jen Miller said her group "will continue to work tirelessly to defend all state lands from industrial activities like fracking until they are set aside for generations to come, which starts with repealing bills like HB 133 altogether."

Oregon

March 12. The Oregon Community Rights Network (OCRN) launched a campaign to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2016 ballot that will affirm the right to local self-government in a move that would help anti-fracking activists in the state. If ratified, the amendment would grant legal rights to communities and even natural environments that can be violated.

The initiative is joins a growing local-rights movement around the country that is frustrating oil and gas companies. Mary Geddry, a representative with OCRN, noted that more than 200 communities across the U.S. have passed ordinances protecting local rights. "Only nine have been challenged in court," she said.

Pennsylvania

January 29. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf fulfilled a campaign promise and signed an executive order reinstating a moratorium on fracking in the state's public lands, protecting about a million acres that sit on the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation.

Texas

December 25. Anti-fracking activist Cathy McMullen, who started the nonprofit Denton Drilling Awareness Group that launched a petition to enact a citywide fracking ban, was named a finalist for the 2014 Texan of the Year Award by Dallas Morning News. This followed an Election Day in which voters passed a ballot initiative making Denton, located near the birthplace of fracking, the first city in Texas to pass a fracking ban.

March 23. Documentary filmmaker and Denton resident Garrett Graham released a new trailer for Don't Frack with Denton, his forthcoming film that tells the story of "how one tenacious Texas town managed to upstage the oil and gas industry with the power of music and community organizing."

Utah

March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal challenging BLM's plan to auction off more than 15,000 acres of public land in southern Utah to fracking companies. A 2014 report by WildEarth Guardians found that the carbon emission cost from oil and gas produced from public lands could exceed $50 billion.

Looking Ahead

While local fracking battles continue to rage around the nation, there has been interesting activity on the federal level, beyond the recent announcement from the White House.

House bill H.R. 5844, the Protect Our Public Lands Act seeks to amend the Mineral Leasing Act to prohibit a lessee from conducting any activity under the lease for fracking purposes. It was introduced in early December by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) during the last session of Congress and there are plans to reintroduce the bill in the current session.

On March 18, representatives Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Diana DeGette (D-CO), Chris Gibson (R-NY), Jared Polis (D-CO) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the so-called Frack Pack, a set of five bills that aim to close loopholes in environmental laws that have been used by oil and gas companies to frack without proper oversight.

While state and local anti-fracking measures and federal bills to curb fracking have been making headlines, for fracktivists the big enchilada is a national ban.

"Communities that have already suffered from fracking, like Longmont, Colorado, are rising up to pass local bans," said Miranda Carter, a spokesperson at Food & Water Watch. "But we need to protect every community in the country by calling for a national ban on fracking: to slow or stop the process where it's already happening, and elsewhere, to prevent it before it starts."

From the aggressive anti-fracking moves in Maryland to a statewide ban in New York, the anti-fracking movement is alive and well.

The nation's first federal regulations on fracking, unveiled by the Obama administration last week, sparked immediate criticism from leading anti-fracking activists.

Americans Against Fracking, a coalition of 250 environmental and liberal groups that includes Greenpeace, 350.org, MoveOn.org, CREDO, Food & Water Watch, Rainforest Action Network and Friends of the Earth, issued a statement characterizing the new rules—meant chiefly to reduce the threat of fracking-related water contamination—as "toothless."

Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, who serves on the Americans Against Fracking advisory board, said that Obama's fracking regulations "are nothing more than a giveaway to the oil and gas industry." The group's goal is a complete fracking ban on federal land, where as many as 100,00 oil and gas wells have been drilled.

The new rules apply only to oil and gas drilling on federal lands, which represent about 25 percent of the national fossil fuel output and only some 10 percent of the nation's fracking. The rules don't apply to drilling on private or state-owned land. Currently, fracking occurs in 22 states.

Since states are responsible for regulating most of the fracking in the U.S., the anti-fracking battlefield—a patchwork of communities around the nation taking a stand to protect their air, water and soil–is understandably a bit fractured. With that in mind, here's a brief look around the country at some recent fracktivist highlights at the state and local level.

February 24. Bolstered by an admission by California state regulators that oil companies are disposing toxic waste into protected aquifers in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, more than 150 environmental and community groups filed a legal petition urging the governor to use his emergency powers to place a moratorium on fracking.

March 20. California state Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) and other lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown urging him to "stop illegal injection into non-exempt aquifers" to protect the state's water from oil waste.

Colorado

February 24. Coloradans Against Fracking activists crashed a state oil and gas task force meeting, launching a campaign for a statewide fracking ban. "Our primary goal is to convince Governor Hickenlooper to ban fracking," said Karen Dike, a member of the new coalition. He can do that with an executive order."

March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal to halt plans by the Bureau of Land Management to open up 36,000 acres of public lands along the Front Range of Colorado to fracking.

"Climate denial at the Interior Department is fueling a fracking rush on our public lands and undermining our nation's efforts to rein in carbon pollution," said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians.

Maryland

March 24. Maryland's House of Delegates passed a bill to ban fracking for three years by a veto-proof 94 to 45. However, it's unclear whether HB 449, currently under review in the state's Senate Committee on Education, Health and Environmental Affairs, has enough support in the Senate to become a law.

March 24. The Senate voted 29 to 17 in favor of a bill holding energy companies financially liable for injury, death or property laws caused by their fracking activities.

Together these measures mark the legislature's most aggressive action to curb fracking in the state.

New Mexico

December 30. The BLM announced it was deferring the issuance of five Navajo allotment parcels for fracking near Chaco Canyon, a World Heritage site, in response to a protest filed by a coalition of environmentalists and watchdog groups demanding a suspension of fracking on public lands in the northwest region of the state.

"Deferring these parcels was the right, and indeed, only legally defensible decision," said Kyle Tisdel, a program director for Western Environmental Law Center (WELC). "Necessary safeguards and analysis must be completed before any further leasing and development of the areas treasured landscapes can continue in compliance with the law."

March 11. A coalition of environmental groups including WELC, WildEarth Guardians and the Navajo organization Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment (Diné CARE) filed suit against the BLM and the U.S. Department of the Interior to prevent fracking from harming Chaco Canyon, the site of numerous ancestral Puebloan ruins and Navajo communities.

New York

December 17. About a month after his re-election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed a statewide ban on fracking, citing health risks. The announcement made New York the second state in the country after Vermont to ban fracking. The decision, which ended years of debate in the Empire State, was by most accounts the biggest environmental story in the United States in 2014, and puts pressure on other states to consider similar bans.

"I've never had anyone say to me, I believe fracking is great," said Cuomo. "Not a single person in those communities. What I get is, I have no alternative but fracking."

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, called the move "a vindication for communities around the country that have been hit hard by unconventional natural gas production."

North Carolina

March 17. On the first day natural gas drilling permits could have been legally accepted in North Carolina, a group of anti-fracking state legislators called for a moratorium.

"We’ve been promised over the last five years that North Carolina would have the nation’s toughest fracking rules, and here we are at zero hour, and we do not have those rules," said Senator Mike Woodard (D-Durham). "The rules are simply insufficient for us to move forward with the issuing of permits."

Ohio

March 18. In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Ohio's normally polarized House of Representatives voted unanimously to ban fracking in state parks. While activists applauded the move, Ohio Sierra Club director Jen Miller said her group "will continue to work tirelessly to defend all state lands from industrial activities like fracking until they are set aside for generations to come, which starts with repealing bills like HB 133 altogether."

Oregon

March 12. The Oregon Community Rights Network (OCRN) launched a campaign to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2016 ballot that will affirm the right to local self-government in a move that would help anti-fracking activists in the state. If ratified, the amendment would grant legal rights to communities and even natural environments that can be violated.

The initiative is joins a growing local-rights movement around the country that is frustrating oil and gas companies. Mary Geddry, a representative with OCRN, noted that more than 200 communities across the U.S. have passed ordinances protecting local rights. "Only nine have been challenged in court," she said.

Pennsylvania

January 29. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf fulfilled a campaign promise and signed an executive order reinstating a moratorium on fracking in the state's public lands, protecting about a million acres that sit on the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation.

Texas

December 25. Anti-fracking activist Cathy McMullen, who started the nonprofit Denton Drilling Awareness Group that launched a petition to enact a citywide fracking ban, was named a finalist for the 2014 Texan of the Year Award by Dallas Morning News. This followed an Election Day in which voters passed a ballot initiative making Denton, located near the birthplace of fracking, the first city in Texas to pass a fracking ban.

March 23. Documentary filmmaker and Denton resident Garrett Graham released a new trailer for Don't Frack with Denton, his forthcoming film that tells the story of "how one tenacious Texas town managed to upstage the oil and gas industry with the power of music and community organizing."

Utah

March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal challenging BLM's plan to auction off more than 15,000 acres of public land in southern Utah to fracking companies. A 2014 report by WildEarth Guardians found that the carbon emission cost from oil and gas produced from public lands could exceed $50 billion.

Looking Ahead

While local fracking battles continue to rage around the nation, there has been interesting activity on the federal level, beyond the recent announcement from the White House.

House bill H.R. 5844, the Protect Our Public Lands Act seeks to amend the Mineral Leasing Act to prohibit a lessee from conducting any activity under the lease for fracking purposes. It was introduced in early December by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) during the last session of Congress and there are plans to reintroduce the bill in the current session.

On March 18, representatives Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Diana DeGette (D-CO), Chris Gibson (R-NY), Jared Polis (D-CO) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the so-called Frack Pack, a set of five bills that aim to close loopholes in environmental laws that have been used by oil and gas companies to frack without proper oversight.

While state and local anti-fracking measures and federal bills to curb fracking have been making headlines, for fracktivists the big enchilada is a national ban.

"Communities that have already suffered from fracking, like Longmont, Colorado, are rising up to pass local bans," said Miranda Carter, a spokesperson at Food & Water Watch. "But we need to protect every community in the country by calling for a national ban on fracking: to slow or stop the process where it's already happening, and elsewhere, to prevent it before it starts."

Appearing before a Nebraska Oil & Gas Conservation committee hearing, a local farmer received nothing but silence from the pro-fracking members of the board after he invited them to drink glasses of water tainted by fracking.

In the video, uploaded to YouTube by BoldNebraska, Nebraskan James Osborne used his 3 minutes before the committee to visually explain what fracking waste can do to the water table, dramatically pouring out water containing his own “private mixture” of fracking additives.

The committee is holding public hearings on a proposal by an oil company to ship out-of-state fracking wastewater into Nebraska where it will be dumped into a “disposal well” in Sioux County. According to a report, the Terex Energy Corp wants to truck as much as 10,000 barrels a day of the chemical-laden fracking wastewater to a ranch north of Mitchell, Nebraska for disposal.

Explaining that he has ties to the oil industry and that he is still on the fence about fracking, Osbourne explained fluid dynamics to the board while pouring out three cups of the sludgy water that could result from spills or from seeping into the water table.

Referring to earlier testimony, Osbourne said, “So you told me this morning that you would drink this water,” as he indicated the cups.

“So would you drink it? Yes or no?” he asked, only to be met by silence by the stone-faced group before a member explained they wouldn’t be answering any questions.

“Oh, you can’t answer any questions? Well my answer would be ‘no.’ I don’t want this in the water that will travel entirely across this state in three days,” Osborne said. “There is no doubt there will be contamination. There will be spills.”

Osborne left the glasses on the table before thanking the committee and leaving to applause.

Appearing before a Nebraska Oil & Gas Conservation committee hearing, a local farmer received nothing but silence from the pro-fracking members of the board after he invited them to drink glasses of water tainted by fracking.

In the video, uploaded to YouTube by BoldNebraska, Nebraskan James Osborne used his 3 minutes before the committee to visually explain what fracking waste can do to the water table, dramatically pouring out water containing his own “private mixture” of fracking additives.

The committee is holding public hearings on a proposal by an oil company to ship out-of-state fracking wastewater into Nebraska where it will be dumped into a “disposal well” in Sioux County. According to a report, the Terex Energy Corp wants to truck as much as 10,000 barrels a day of the chemical-laden fracking wastewater to a ranch north of Mitchell, Nebraska for disposal.

Explaining that he has ties to the oil industry and that he is still on the fence about fracking, Osbourne explained fluid dynamics to the board while pouring out three cups of the sludgy water that could result from spills or from seeping into the water table.

Referring to earlier testimony, Osbourne said, “So you told me this morning that you would drink this water,” as he indicated the cups.

“So would you drink it? Yes or no?” he asked, only to be met by silence by the stone-faced group before a member explained they wouldn’t be answering any questions.

“Oh, you can’t answer any questions? Well my answer would be ‘no.’ I don’t want this in the water that will travel entirely across this state in three days,” Osborne said. “There is no doubt there will be contamination. There will be spills.”

Osborne left the glasses on the table before thanking the committee and leaving to applause.

The boom and bust in North Dakota has trapped people there, with little hope of work or escape.

WILLISTON, N.D.—From the looks of it, the nation’s boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl— all that traffic — and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like bonfires.

Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can’t seem to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.

But life at the center of the country’s largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying up, even as the unemployed keep coming.

Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door.

Some of these job seekers are sleeping in their trucks, in utility sheds, behind piles of garbage by the railroad tracks, wherever they can curl up.

Only a year ago, Williston’s shale oil explosion was still gushing jobs. From 2010 to 2014, thanks to the Bakken shale oil patch, it was the fastest growing small city in the nation. Williston nearly tripled in size, from 12,000 to 35,000 people. But the number of active rigs used to drill new wells in the Bakken dropped to 111 in March, the lowest number since April 2010, according to state figures. Low oil prices have prompted drilling to slow down, and companies big and small have been laying off workers and cutting hours.

City officials paint a rosy picture. They cite North Dakota Job Service reports that maintain there are 116 jobs in Williston for every 100 residents, point to North Dakota’s ranking among oil­-producing states (number two, after Texas), call the oil production slowdown a blip and say the oil patch is still growing.

But the city’s job numbers do not match the reality on the ground. At the Command Center, oil jobs have dropped by 10 percent since last Fall, said Kyle Tennessen, the branch manager. Compounding the job shortage, laid-­off oil workers were competing with others for construction jobs and everything else, Tennessen added.

Some migrants have already left, or are planning to, according to the local U­Haul companies. They report fewer people renting vans and trucks to move into town and more laid­-off workers renting vehicles to move out.

The rest are becoming Williston’s version of day laborers. They compete for low­-paying jobs such as picking up trash, doing laundry and mopping floors, that make enough for them to eat, but not enough to afford a place to live. (The average one­-bedroom apartment in Williston costs $2,395 a month.)

Some live in one room with several other men, pooling resources and splitting costs. Others don’t know where they’ll sleep from one night to the next.

The Salvation Army has offered stranded workers a one­-way ticket back home. But many job seekers seem unwilling to leave—at least not until they can make a success out of their sacrificial move to a place with six months of winter, the worst traffic they’ve ever seen, and a disgruntled, if not miserable, populace.

“You just have to cowboy up and expect things to get better,” said Terry Ray Cover, a 56­-year-­old farmer and jack­-of-­all-­trades who came from southeast Iowa on a Greyhound bus in November. He’d heard North Dakota was raining jobs.

“They don’t tell you it’s all a lie,” he said, sipping coffee in the Salvation Army on a frigid day in early March. “Places advertise jobs and then tell you they’re not hiring.”

The jobs he sees ads for, Cover said, require certifications and degrees, “like engineering.” He had found odd jobs, one at a cattle ranch, since he arrived in Williston. But he hadn’t worked in four weeks, despite daily treks to the Command Center.

Cover, bundled in a ski suit, had spent the most frigid nights of winter (­20 Fahrenheit) in a tin shelter he discovered within walking distance of the Command Center, his best hope for work. He was relying on the Salvation Army for his daily bread and new friends for his daily smokes.

The men—they are all men—hanging out at the Salvation Army for coffee, bread and whatever donated goods there might be on a given day (from 9am to 3pm) have come from all over, including Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Louisiana, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. They include a number of African immigrants originally from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal.

But their stories are close to the same. They heard Williston had jobs, and they weren’t having any luck back home. So they hopped in their truck, or a Greyhound bus, and hopped off to a rude awakening.

Most of the men, who range in age from their early 30s to late 50s, have spent 10 nights, the maximum allowed, at a 10­-bed emergency shelter the Salvation Army and a local church set up, leasing 10 beds at a camp for oil workers (a so-­called man camp). More than 100 men applied to stay at the emergency shelter since it resumed operating for the second year in November. (It was set to close March 31 but has extended its season due to demand.)

Although there is camaraderie among the migrants, they are openly frustrated, and the room where they hang out at the Salvation Army is often tense and gloomy. Men who have been sleeping outside in the elements, or trying to, fold themselves into corners to get real sleep. The African immigrants tend to hang together, but a lot of loners fill the room.

Ali Singa, who moved to North Dakota from Nashville nine months ago, started out in Fargo, making $11 an hour the day after he arrived in shipping. He stayed for three months before heading to Williston, where he heard he could make more money, enough to send to his wife and three children in Sierra Leone.

He found work in a nearby oil patch town, Watford City, hauling water, but he was laid off in December and has not been able to land another job. “A lack of a job has trapped me here,” Singa said. “Right now, I’m staying with friends. I’m in a very bad situation. You must put this down in your report: At the same time that they’re advertising jobs, they’re laying people off, and people keep coming and keep coming.”

Singa, a high school French teacher in his native country, moved to Washington, D.C. from the Sierra Leone 10 years ago, seeking a better life for his family back home. But after being laid off from a baggage handler job, he has not had much luck with his relocations.

“Had I stayed home I would’ve been better off by now,” he said. “But hope has kept me here, because hope is the poor man’s bread. Why can’t I get a job? I don’t have any felonies, no arrests. I am a good person. It’s the strangest thing. Is it because of the color of my skin? I tell people back home to not come here.”

Singa leaves to find work every morning at 5:30, and is usually the first one to arrive at the Command Center. But jobs are not doled out on a first­-come basis. They are handed out based on qualifications, and rankings workers have received from employers, Kyle Tennessen said. That works against the newest workers, without a hiring history.

On a recent typical morning, Tennessen doled out seven day jobs—restaurant work, construction site clean­up, maintenance­­—leaving 22 people who’d arrived before daybreak with no work for another day.

One of them happened to be a woman. Louise Provus, 50, moved from Spokane to Williston two years ago with her husband, Randy Fleming, 57. “For the first two years,” she said, “I had a job at the local dry cleaners. In April, I started working for a cleaning company as a domestic. But that’s just once a week now, so I’m still looking.”

Fleming, who lost an automotive shop in Spokane to fire, has been looking for work doing anything. But he has not landed a permanent job. “I’ve got like 40 applications out there,” he said. “I’ve been in here all week. And some days, I’ve been in here all day, just in case. We’ll come here at six and I’ll stay till two or three in the afternoon. Then I’ll take the heel­toe express home.”

He and his wife are among the luckier regulars at the Command Center. They found an apartment in subsidized senior housing for $600 a month. Even so, Provus said, they struggle to pay the rent. “I think I’ll go to the library after this and put in an application at Walmart,” she said.

Walmart has had the same sign out front advertising jobs at $17 an hour for three years, despite hiring freezes.

“I know it’s a long shot,” Provus said. “Make sure you tell people that if you get any job out here, no matter how bad, you’d better take it, because it’s the best you’re going to get.”

The boom and bust in North Dakota has trapped people there, with little hope of work or escape.

WILLISTON, N.D.—From the looks of it, the nation’s boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl— all that traffic — and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like bonfires.

Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can’t seem to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.

But life at the center of the country’s largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying up, even as the unemployed keep coming.

Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door.

Some of these job seekers are sleeping in their trucks, in utility sheds, behind piles of garbage by the railroad tracks, wherever they can curl up.

Only a year ago, Williston’s shale oil explosion was still gushing jobs. From 2010 to 2014, thanks to the Bakken shale oil patch, it was the fastest growing small city in the nation. Williston nearly tripled in size, from 12,000 to 35,000 people. But the number of active rigs used to drill new wells in the Bakken dropped to 111 in March, the lowest number since April 2010, according to state figures. Low oil prices have prompted drilling to slow down, and companies big and small have been laying off workers and cutting hours.

City officials paint a rosy picture. They cite North Dakota Job Service reports that maintain there are 116 jobs in Williston for every 100 residents, point to North Dakota’s ranking among oil­-producing states (number two, after Texas), call the oil production slowdown a blip and say the oil patch is still growing.

But the city’s job numbers do not match the reality on the ground. At the Command Center, oil jobs have dropped by 10 percent since last Fall, said Kyle Tennessen, the branch manager. Compounding the job shortage, laid-­off oil workers were competing with others for construction jobs and everything else, Tennessen added.

Some migrants have already left, or are planning to, according to the local U­Haul companies. They report fewer people renting vans and trucks to move into town and more laid­-off workers renting vehicles to move out.

The rest are becoming Williston’s version of day laborers. They compete for low­-paying jobs such as picking up trash, doing laundry and mopping floors, that make enough for them to eat, but not enough to afford a place to live. (The average one­-bedroom apartment in Williston costs $2,395 a month.)

Some live in one room with several other men, pooling resources and splitting costs. Others don’t know where they’ll sleep from one night to the next.

The Salvation Army has offered stranded workers a one­-way ticket back home. But many job seekers seem unwilling to leave—at least not until they can make a success out of their sacrificial move to a place with six months of winter, the worst traffic they’ve ever seen, and a disgruntled, if not miserable, populace.

“You just have to cowboy up and expect things to get better,” said Terry Ray Cover, a 56­-year-­old farmer and jack­-of-­all-­trades who came from southeast Iowa on a Greyhound bus in November. He’d heard North Dakota was raining jobs.

“They don’t tell you it’s all a lie,” he said, sipping coffee in the Salvation Army on a frigid day in early March. “Places advertise jobs and then tell you they’re not hiring.”

The jobs he sees ads for, Cover said, require certifications and degrees, “like engineering.” He had found odd jobs, one at a cattle ranch, since he arrived in Williston. But he hadn’t worked in four weeks, despite daily treks to the Command Center.

Cover, bundled in a ski suit, had spent the most frigid nights of winter (­20 Fahrenheit) in a tin shelter he discovered within walking distance of the Command Center, his best hope for work. He was relying on the Salvation Army for his daily bread and new friends for his daily smokes.

The men—they are all men—hanging out at the Salvation Army for coffee, bread and whatever donated goods there might be on a given day (from 9am to 3pm) have come from all over, including Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Louisiana, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. They include a number of African immigrants originally from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal.

But their stories are close to the same. They heard Williston had jobs, and they weren’t having any luck back home. So they hopped in their truck, or a Greyhound bus, and hopped off to a rude awakening.

Most of the men, who range in age from their early 30s to late 50s, have spent 10 nights, the maximum allowed, at a 10­-bed emergency shelter the Salvation Army and a local church set up, leasing 10 beds at a camp for oil workers (a so-­called man camp). More than 100 men applied to stay at the emergency shelter since it resumed operating for the second year in November. (It was set to close March 31 but has extended its season due to demand.)

Although there is camaraderie among the migrants, they are openly frustrated, and the room where they hang out at the Salvation Army is often tense and gloomy. Men who have been sleeping outside in the elements, or trying to, fold themselves into corners to get real sleep. The African immigrants tend to hang together, but a lot of loners fill the room.

Ali Singa, who moved to North Dakota from Nashville nine months ago, started out in Fargo, making $11 an hour the day after he arrived in shipping. He stayed for three months before heading to Williston, where he heard he could make more money, enough to send to his wife and three children in Sierra Leone.

He found work in a nearby oil patch town, Watford City, hauling water, but he was laid off in December and has not been able to land another job. “A lack of a job has trapped me here,” Singa said. “Right now, I’m staying with friends. I’m in a very bad situation. You must put this down in your report: At the same time that they’re advertising jobs, they’re laying people off, and people keep coming and keep coming.”

Singa, a high school French teacher in his native country, moved to Washington, D.C. from the Sierra Leone 10 years ago, seeking a better life for his family back home. But after being laid off from a baggage handler job, he has not had much luck with his relocations.

“Had I stayed home I would’ve been better off by now,” he said. “But hope has kept me here, because hope is the poor man’s bread. Why can’t I get a job? I don’t have any felonies, no arrests. I am a good person. It’s the strangest thing. Is it because of the color of my skin? I tell people back home to not come here.”

Singa leaves to find work every morning at 5:30, and is usually the first one to arrive at the Command Center. But jobs are not doled out on a first­-come basis. They are handed out based on qualifications, and rankings workers have received from employers, Kyle Tennessen said. That works against the newest workers, without a hiring history.

On a recent typical morning, Tennessen doled out seven day jobs—restaurant work, construction site clean­up, maintenance­­—leaving 22 people who’d arrived before daybreak with no work for another day.

One of them happened to be a woman. Louise Provus, 50, moved from Spokane to Williston two years ago with her husband, Randy Fleming, 57. “For the first two years,” she said, “I had a job at the local dry cleaners. In April, I started working for a cleaning company as a domestic. But that’s just once a week now, so I’m still looking.”

Fleming, who lost an automotive shop in Spokane to fire, has been looking for work doing anything. But he has not landed a permanent job. “I’ve got like 40 applications out there,” he said. “I’ve been in here all week. And some days, I’ve been in here all day, just in case. We’ll come here at six and I’ll stay till two or three in the afternoon. Then I’ll take the heel­toe express home.”

He and his wife are among the luckier regulars at the Command Center. They found an apartment in subsidized senior housing for $600 a month. Even so, Provus said, they struggle to pay the rent. “I think I’ll go to the library after this and put in an application at Walmart,” she said.

Walmart has had the same sign out front advertising jobs at $17 an hour for three years, despite hiring freezes.

“I know it’s a long shot,” Provus said. “Make sure you tell people that if you get any job out here, no matter how bad, you’d better take it, because it’s the best you’re going to get.”

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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/dont-frack-denton-communitys-fight-defend-home-ruleDon’t Frack with Denton: A Community’s Fight to Defend Home Rulehttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/87948917/0/alternet_fracking~Don%e2%80%99t-Frack-with-Denton-A-Community%e2%80%99s-Fight-to-Defend-Home-Rule

The town is the first Texas municipality to ban fracking and has become ground zero for the fracking debate.

The town is the first municipality in Texas to ban fracking and has consequently become ground zero for the fracking debate. Yesterday, Denton Mayor Chris Watts and City Attorney Anita Burgess traveled to Austin to testify at a hearing on two bills that have emerged in response to Denton’s fracking ban, according to Frack Free Denton. In solidarity with grassroots organizers from the Frack Free Denton movement and other residents from small Texas towns who also testified in Austin, documentary filmmaker and Denton resident Garrett Graham released a new trailer for his forthcoming film.

With the help of Frack Free Denton, Graham made a film that “chronicles Denton’s uphill battle against oil and gas interest deep in the heart of the gas patch,” said Frack Free Denton. The oil and gas industry is working hard to undo Denton’s ban and to keep other cities from following Denton’s example but residents of Denton are speaking out.

In the trailer one resident and mother says, “”When I hear people say, well if you’re against fracking, you’re against jobs. I think, well if you’re for fracking, you’re against children. I just want kids to be able to breathe.” She says she worries every day about fracking’s health impacts on her children now and in the future. Another resident plays the ukulele to a beautiful song she wrote about how all residents deserve a frack free Denton.

Graham and his partner, Truthout's Assistant Editor and Reporter Candice Bernd, are producing the film titled Don't Frack With Denton, which chronicles their hometown's ban on fracking after a landslide election victory last November. The film will premiere this coming May.

The short documentary showcases how their tenacious Texas town managed to upstage the oil and gas industry with the power of music and community organizing. The film will show how fracking was allowed next door to homes, hospitals, playgrounds and schools in Denton, leaving the town with some of the worst air quality in the country.

The town is the first municipality in Texas to ban fracking and has consequently become ground zero for the fracking debate. Yesterday, Denton Mayor Chris Watts and City Attorney Anita Burgess traveled to Austin to testify at a hearing on two bills that have emerged in response to Denton’s fracking ban, according to Frack Free Denton. In solidarity with grassroots organizers from the Frack Free Denton movement and other residents from small Texas towns who also testified in Austin, documentary filmmaker and Denton resident Garrett Graham released a new trailer for his forthcoming film.

With the help of Frack Free Denton, Graham made a film that “chronicles Denton’s uphill battle against oil and gas interest deep in the heart of the gas patch,” said Frack Free Denton. The oil and gas industry is working hard to undo Denton’s ban and to keep other cities from following Denton’s example but residents of Denton are speaking out.

In the trailer one resident and mother says, “”When I hear people say, well if you’re against fracking, you’re against jobs. I think, well if you’re for fracking, you’re against children. I just want kids to be able to breathe.” She says she worries every day about fracking’s health impacts on her children now and in the future. Another resident plays the ukulele to a beautiful song she wrote about how all residents deserve a frack free Denton.

Graham and his partner, Truthout's Assistant Editor and Reporter Candice Bernd, are producing the film titled Don't Frack With Denton, which chronicles their hometown's ban on fracking after a landslide election victory last November. The film will premiere this coming May.

The short documentary showcases how their tenacious Texas town managed to upstage the oil and gas industry with the power of music and community organizing. The film will show how fracking was allowed next door to homes, hospitals, playgrounds and schools in Denton, leaving the town with some of the worst air quality in the country.

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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/inside-big-energys-alliance-intelligence-clamp-down-fracking-opponentsInside Big Energy's Alliance With Intelligence to Clamp Down on Fracking Opponentshttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/87948918/0/alternet_fracking~Inside-Big-Energys-Alliance-With-Intelligence-to-Clamp-Down-on-Fracking-Opponents

The fossil fuel industry is now an economic behemoth firmly hitched to the national security state.

In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an intelligence bulletin to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent “criminal incidents” suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded: “Environmental extremism will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause.”

Not long after the bulletin was distributed, a private security firm providing intelligence reports to the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security cited the FBI document in order to justify the surveillance of anti-fracking groups. The same security firm concluded that the “escalating conflict over natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania” could lead to an increase in “environmentalist activity or eco-terrorism.”

Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels. In 2011, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP ) published a report titled, “Environmental Criminal Extremism and Canada’s Energy Sector.” The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a “clear and present criminal threat” to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms “violence” and “direct action” are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry will lead to extremism. (The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questions about the 2010 bulletin.)

Yet even as the resistance to “extreme energy projects” has grown in size and scope, there is little evidence to support the breathless warnings about “eco-terrorism.” There has been no upward spiral in criminality among environmental activists. To the contrary, arson, property destruction, and other acts of violence most closely associated with the radical animal rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s have become all but nonexistent. According to figures compiled by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at the University of Maryland, there has been only a handful of incidents defined as eco-terrorism since 2010. In fact, between 2010 and 2013, the latest year for which the GTD has published figures, out of a total of 54 terror incidents in the United States, five were attributed to the Animal Liberation Front. The last recorded incident carried out by the Earth Liberation Front – the bulldozing of two radio transmission towers in Washington – was in 2009. Earth First! hasn’t appeared in the database since 1994.

Instead, environmentalists have largely relied on classic social change strategies such as choreographed nonviolent civil disobedience, carefully planned protests, and divestment from the fossil fuel industry. “Overall we’ve seen a decline in activity, in terms of violent criminal activity” among environmentalists, an FBI intelligence analyst told The Washington Post in 2012.

Nevertheless, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and many state law enforcement agencies continue to promote the idea that environmental extremism is on the rise. The oil and gas industry is spending more on security than it ever has. According to a 2013 report by Frost & Sullivan, a marketing research and consulting company, annual spending on global oil and gas infrastructure security is expected to top $30 billion in just a few years. (In comparison, $30 billion is roughly what South Korea spends on defense annually.) “Surveillance will continue to dominate the oil and gas infrastructure security market,” a summary of the report states.

At the same time, numerous intelligence-sharing networks between the private sector and law enforcement have been established at every level of government, giving rise to an unprecedented energy-intelligence complex. They range from project-specific and regional networks like the Nebraska Information Analysis Center’s Keystone Pipeline Portal community and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee, to federal programs like the FBI’s Oil and Natural Gas Crime Issues Special Interest Group and the Department of Homeland Security’s Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council. These public-private partnerships, coupled with a revolving door between intelligence agencies and the more lucrative energy industry, have created a new kind of foe for the environmental movement. The fossil fuel industry is now an economic behemoth firmly hitched to the national security state.

It is true that environmentalists pose a threat to the energy industry – just not in the way the FBI or RCMP believe. The threat to the industry is existential and economic, not extremist. If the movement to end our reliance on fossil fuels prevails, the oil and gas industry will lose trillions of dollars in forecast profits. According to an estimate by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, if we hope to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the energy sector would have to leave more than $20 trillion worth of fossil fuels in the ground. “The oil and gas industry is doing everything they can to ensure they’re in business for the next 30 to 50 years and doing so at a time when we should be, as a nation, collectively figuring out how to stop using those same fossil fuels over the next ten years,” says Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.

Conflict between fossil fuel interests and environmentalists is inevitable. But as the contest becomes ever more stark, there seems to be little effort to distinguish between lawful political activism and illegal activities. The fossil fuel industry’s reasonable concerns about the strength of its political opponents have morphed into a kind of paranoia, one that threatens to criminalize constitutionally protected dissent.

In the years since the FBI and RCMP reports, unconventional oil and gas development has been met with sustained protest, from small scale tree sits and encampments to massive nationwide demonstrations. The opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is only the most high-profile example of resistance to the fossil fuel industry. The term “Blockadia” has been used to describe the loose network of citizens seeking to disrupt the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. Tactics vary depending on the region and political backdrop, but the emphasis has been on nonviolent civil disobedience, legal action, and ballot measures to hamper pipeline projects, ban fracking, and prevent or slow down tar sands extraction. A handful of pipeline projects ­– including Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and Williams Companies’ Constitution pipelines – have been stymied. In mid-December, after several years of intense organizing, lobbying, and direct action campaigns, New York became the first state with substantial shale gas reserves to ban fracking. Towns in Colorado, Texas, and Ohio have passed restrictions that limit oil and gas drilling.

Such successes have emboldened these groups and inspired action elsewhere. (Of course it should be noted that oil and gas development has hardly been halted; it continues apace throughout North America.) Rather than lead to an increase in criminal activity, as the FBI predicted, opposition to the oil and gas industry has, in some ways, become more mainstream. “Five years ago you would have never seen the faces of rural farmers and ranchers and tribal leaders on the front lines of climate actions,” says Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, an environmental group opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline. “This unlikely Cowboy and Indian Alliance that is also working shoulder to shoulder with big green groups is changing the way America looks at the issue of land, water, and climate change.”

But the new face of the environmental movement seems not to have registered with an industry intent on steamrolling its critics. In 2011, in comments that have been widely cited, a spokesman for Anadarko Petroleum described the anti-fracking movement as an “insurgency” and suggested that industry insiders download the US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as a guide to dealing with it. Less well known is the fact that Anadarko has built up a team of former intelligence operatives to combat what it views as an insurrection. The company’s southwest regional security manager was an officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was involved in undercover work. Another Anadarko security manager, LC Wilson, was regional commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2009 to 2011 and oversaw law enforcement statewide. Anadarko has also been involved in the creation of at least two Oilfield Crime Committees, one in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, both of which are headed by former law enforcement officials. The South Texas Oilfield Crime Committee and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee have gathered intelligence on environmental activists and routinely exchange information with law enforcement.

Anadarko is not alone. Most large energy companies have security teams run by former FBI, Secret Service, or law enforcement personnel. The director of corporate security at Devon Energy, for example, was a special agent with the Secret Service for 14 years. Chevron’s chief security officer was the former head of the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. And BP’s head of Government and Political Affairs from 2007 to 2012 worked for MI6, Britain’s top spy agency.

In most cases these security teams have been deployed to manage crises overseas. In Indonesia, for example, ExxonMobil ran its own intelligence operations and consulted regularly with the country’s military leaders as it sought to protect its assets amid destabilizing political conditions. In 2012 The Guardian reported that Shell Oil maintained a 1,200-person police force plus a network of undercover informants in Nigeria and spent tens of millions of dollars on security in the region.

As shale oil and gas development has expanded in North America, the frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Range Resources, one of the largest drillers in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale, has admitted to hiring veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with experience in psychological warfare – or Psyops – to engage with local communities.

Even as the energy industry has beefed up its own in-house intelligence operations, it has established increasingly close ties with law enforcement agencies. This is partly a result of the post-9/11 national security state and the premium placed on information sharing. The Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC), established by the Department of Homeland Security in 2006, holds quarterly meetings to facilitate information sharing between the private sector and government agencies. (Meetings are exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which means there is no public oversight. Indeed, the Critical Infrastructure Information Act of 2002 stipulates that information voluntarily submitted by industry to the DHS or DOE is protected from public disclosure.) Within CIPAC there is an Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council and an Energy Government Coordinating Council. According to minutes from an August 2013 CIPAC meeting, the DHS has been working to provide more security clearances to the energy industry. “Currently DHS is working to enhance policies to share more classified information both cyber and non-cyber related,” the document states. Anadarko, Kinder Morgan, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute are frequent participants and sponsors of CIPAC meetings.

In addition to CIPAC there is a Homeland Security Information Sharing Network for the Oil and Gas Industry (HSIN-ONG), a web-based platform that allows companies to communicate with each other and with law enforcement. It also gives them access to Suspicious Activity Reports and other intelligence related information. Around the same time that the information-sharing network was being created, the Department of Justice launched its National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative to “improve the sharing of suspicious activity reports among state, local, tribal, and federal law-enforcement organizations, as well as private sector entities.”

Intelligence-sharing systems also have been developed at the state level. The Nebraska Information Analysis Center (one of more than 70 Homeland Security “fusion centers”) has its own network that focuses on “possible unlawful tactics and techniques of individuals/groups opposed to Keystone XL pipeline.” According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal through a public records request, oil infrastructure company TransCanada has its own page in the HSIN portal where suspicious activity reports can be posted. TransCanada representatives, FBI agents, county attorneys, local sheriffs, and the US assistant attorney general all have access to the Keystone pipeline network.

Despite the numerous federal, state, and regional information-sharing networks established during the past decade, the industry has been reluctant to participate in programs that might be subject to public oversight. Thus last summer the oil and gas industry announced the creation of its own information sharing and analysis center, or ISAC, which allows member companies to submit intelligence anonymously and is exempt from public disclosure.

The industry’s fear of transparency is part of a larger pattern. Oil and gas firms often express alarm about having their facilities photographed or filmed by citizen watchdogs, which can lead to official investigations. For example, in 2011 the Rocky Mountain Energy Security Group (yet another regional intelligence sharing network) issued a security report that described activists in Pavillion, Wyoming who had photographed a natural gas processing facility. The report, which was disseminated to law enforcement and security professionals in the industry, defined the behavior as “suspicious activity” and said that the information was being circulated in order to determine “whether the activity has any underlying criminal or terrorism nexus (or intent).”

In recent years the FBI has pursued environmental activists in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho for little more than taking photographs of oil and gas industry installations. In 2011, after receiving an anonymous tip, the FBI went after Texas activist Ben Kessler, a member of the direct action environmental group Rising Tide North America. In November 2013 and February 2014, a Pennsylvania state trooper and member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force visited anti-fracking activists at their homes in New York and Pennsylvania under the pretext that they had trespassed while taking photos of a gas compressor station. More recently, members of Rising Tide in the Pacific Northwest have been contacted or visited by FBI agents. (The energy companies’ fear of transparency is in some ways similar to the livestock industry’s exposé anxiety, which has led to the passage of so-called ag-gag laws that prohibit the filming of farms and ranches.)

The frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

But what happens when the private sector’s assumptions about criminal activity are wrong or misleading? In Pennsylvania the oil and gas industry has driven speculation that environmental organizations were behind several acts of vandalism at or near drilling sites, even though there’s no evidence of any link whatsoever. The unfounded assertion has spilled into the local press. In February 2014, The Williamsport Sun-Gazette in northeast Pennsylvania ran a story about the crimes headlined, “Ecoterror Target: Gas companies bolster security in response to threats.”

Jeff Monaghan, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario who writes on issues of surveillance, says the RCMP document reflects how deeply intertwined the suspicions of energy companies and intelligence agencies have become. “The broader context of this document is a very, very close working relationship between the Critical Infrastructure Protection team and the energy corporations. As the relationship develops the underlying belief is that environmentalists are first-and-foremost a threat to the economy. It’s really about protecting shared values of economic growth.”

Or, as the RCMP report put it, “Canada’s economic growth … and the objectives of environmentalists are in direct conflict.” Environmental activists wouldn’t disagree with that, especially given the aggressive pro-energy policies of the Harper government. What they take issue with is the highly provocative claim that their opposition to the energy industry will likely lead to criminal activity. As the interests of the state and energy sector become increasingly close, however, this perception is taking hold. Activists worry that it is shaping law enforcement’s approach to the movement and could lead to a crackdown on legal protest.

“It doesn’t surprise me that the industry is trying really hard to paint the environmental movement as fringe or dangerous, because it’s their last resort,” says Catskill Mountainkeeper’s Gillingham. “It’s behavior based on a losing argument.”

The conflict over the Keystone XL pipeline has reinforced the narrative that economic prosperity and environmental protection are mutually exclusive. Pipeline proponents like to paint the opposition as job killers and, yes, extremists. In April 2014, Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, described the pipeline as “a project that is being blocked purely by environmental extremism.” More recently, US Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, called anti-fracking activists campaigning for a moratorium “radical environmentalists.” A major Washington PR firm, Berman and Co., has launched an ad campaign bankrolled by the energy industry called “Big Green Radicals” that seeks to smear high-profile activists.

But the demonization of environmental advocates goes far beyond mere polemics. TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, has worked closely with law enforcement along the proposed pipeline route from the very early stages of its development. A certain amount of collaboration with law enforcement is to be expected with any major infrastructure project. But TransCanada has gone further. The company has pressured attorneys general to prosecute environmental activists under terrorism statutes. It has given local law enforcement advance notice of meetings with landowners whom the company describes as hostile. And the company has held workshops with local law enforcement and the FBI, including a daylong “strategy meeting” in Oklahoma with the FBI in 2012.

According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, the FBI distributed a bulletin in early 2013 “regarding threat concerns by environmental extremists against the Keystone Pipeline expansion project” to law enforcement across Nebraska. In its strategic plan for 2014-2017, South Dakota Homeland Security identifies what it considers to be extremist enclaves in the state, through which Keystone is proposed to pass. According to the document, “Uranium mining in the southwest part of the state and a proposed oil pipeline in the western part of the state garnered the attention of extremist environmental groups.” The report does not describe or name the groups, their intentions, or tactics. A public records request for additional documents or communication regarding “extremist environmental groups” in South Dakota was denied.

In 2013 Earth Island Journalreported on the infiltration of a Tar Sands Resistance training camp in Oklahoma. Two undercover officers from the Bryan County Sheriff’s office attended the weeklong event and shared intelligence with the Oklahoma Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center. Law enforcement was tipped off and a planned act of civil disobedience was preempted. During that same week TransCanada’s corporate security advisor was in frequent contact with the Oklahoma Fusion Center and made comments on a classified situational awareness bulletin.

In many ways Texas, where the Keystone pipeilne would terminate, is the heart of the American oil and gas industry. Not surprisingly, activists there are routinely harassed by law enforcement and corporate security for nothing more than keeping tabs on the industry. In East Houston, the city’s industrial hub and most polluted neighborhood (Houston itself is one of the most polluted cities in the country), environmental activist and community organizer Bryan Parras has been questioned by the police on several occasions and once was contacted by a Coast Guard special agent assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Houston. The organization he helps run with his father, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (or TEJAS), has been closely watched. Parras frequently takes activists and journalists on what he calls “toxic tours” – a survey of the neighborhood’s refineries, chemical plants, and shipping ports. He’s made a point of documenting the air pollution caused by the flaring at the refineries that flank the neighborhood. He says the images “compel people to action.”

They’ve also made Parras a subject of interest for industry and law enforcement. He is routinely questioned by the police or harassed by security representatives from Valero Energy, a major refining company and one of the industries Parras monitors. In 2013 Parras got a text from a friend, Tish Stringer, saying that an agent had visited her home and wanted to know about her relationship with him. The Coast Guard special agent, David Pileggi, told Stringer he’d been tipped off by Valero.

“It’s nothing new,” Parras says. “Since 9/11 we’ve been harassed repeatedly and pulled over for taking pictures or video of the facilities.”

In an emailed statement, Bill Day, vice president of communications at Valero, said the Houston refinery is designated by Homeland Security as “critical infrastructure” and therefore must meet enhanced security requirements. “One of those requirements,” he wrote, “is that when we see people taking photos or video of our facilities, we ascertain the purpose of that activity and then report it to DHS.” According to Shauna Dunlap, media coordinator for the FBI’s Houston Division, photographing and videotaping of critical infrastructures “can be a precursor of potential criminal activity.” The Joint Terrorism Task Force, she says, is “obligated to look into each and every suspicious activity report.”

This kind of surveillance and intimidation, Parras says, is particularly chilling in an area with a large number of undocumented residents. Not only are they vulnerable to threats of deportation, but also they’re quite literally at the crossroads of environmental destruction and the risks associated with climate change. East Houston is home to a disproportionate number of the city’s largest sources of industrial pollution, four major highways, and the shipping channel that feeds into the Port of Houston. If built, the Keystone XL pipeline would terminate in East Houston; Valero has a contract with TransCanada to receive most of the oil. “On the basis of location alone these neighborhoods appear far more vulnerable to health risks than others in Greater Houston,” a 2006 study commissioned by the mayor’s office concluded. In addition, rising sea levels threaten to inundate the heavily industrialized shoreline. “It puts us at even higher risk because we’re on the coast,” says Parras. “All these facilities are right on the water.”

In many ways, for activists like Parras the last line of defense lies in taking photos, documenting the impacts of industrial pollution, and simply bearing witness. TEJAS hasn’t even engaged in civil disobedience or direct action, he says. Still, his organization is on Valero’s watch list. TEJAS organizers have been followed and photographed or videoed by Valero security personnel. Local teachers who joined Parras on one of his toxic tours were bullied into deleting photos and video they had taken of the refinery. Journalists he has shown around have been threatened by Valero that they’ll be reported to the FBI.

In the eyes of the oil and gas industry this is the new environmental extremism. And that view is being shared with law enforcement at every level.

The intimidation and surveillance have had an impact. Parras says his advocacy has been compromised by Valero’s scrutiny of his organization and the refinery’s close relationship with law enforcement. “It’s difficult to get neighbors to want to engage and speak out,” he says.

The fossil fuel industry is now an economic behemoth firmly hitched to the national security state.

In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an intelligence bulletin to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent “criminal incidents” suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded: “Environmental extremism will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause.”

Not long after the bulletin was distributed, a private security firm providing intelligence reports to the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security cited the FBI document in order to justify the surveillance of anti-fracking groups. The same security firm concluded that the “escalating conflict over natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania” could lead to an increase in “environmentalist activity or eco-terrorism.”

Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels. In 2011, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP ) published a report titled, “Environmental Criminal Extremism and Canada’s Energy Sector.” The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a “clear and present criminal threat” to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms “violence” and “direct action” are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry will lead to extremism. (The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questions about the 2010 bulletin.)

Yet even as the resistance to “extreme energy projects” has grown in size and scope, there is little evidence to support the breathless warnings about “eco-terrorism.” There has been no upward spiral in criminality among environmental activists. To the contrary, arson, property destruction, and other acts of violence most closely associated with the radical animal rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s have become all but nonexistent. According to figures compiled by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at the University of Maryland, there has been only a handful of incidents defined as eco-terrorism since 2010. In fact, between 2010 and 2013, the latest year for which the GTD has published figures, out of a total of 54 terror incidents in the United States, five were attributed to the Animal Liberation Front. The last recorded incident carried out by the Earth Liberation Front – the bulldozing of two radio transmission towers in Washington – was in 2009. Earth First! hasn’t appeared in the database since 1994.

Instead, environmentalists have largely relied on classic social change strategies such as choreographed nonviolent civil disobedience, carefully planned protests, and divestment from the fossil fuel industry. “Overall we’ve seen a decline in activity, in terms of violent criminal activity” among environmentalists, an FBI intelligence analyst told The Washington Post in 2012.

Nevertheless, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and many state law enforcement agencies continue to promote the idea that environmental extremism is on the rise. The oil and gas industry is spending more on security than it ever has. According to a 2013 report by Frost & Sullivan, a marketing research and consulting company, annual spending on global oil and gas infrastructure security is expected to top $30 billion in just a few years. (In comparison, $30 billion is roughly what South Korea spends on defense annually.) “Surveillance will continue to dominate the oil and gas infrastructure security market,” a summary of the report states.

At the same time, numerous intelligence-sharing networks between the private sector and law enforcement have been established at every level of government, giving rise to an unprecedented energy-intelligence complex. They range from project-specific and regional networks like the Nebraska Information Analysis Center’s Keystone Pipeline Portal community and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee, to federal programs like the FBI’s Oil and Natural Gas Crime Issues Special Interest Group and the Department of Homeland Security’s Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council. These public-private partnerships, coupled with a revolving door between intelligence agencies and the more lucrative energy industry, have created a new kind of foe for the environmental movement. The fossil fuel industry is now an economic behemoth firmly hitched to the national security state.

It is true that environmentalists pose a threat to the energy industry – just not in the way the FBI or RCMP believe. The threat to the industry is existential and economic, not extremist. If the movement to end our reliance on fossil fuels prevails, the oil and gas industry will lose trillions of dollars in forecast profits. According to an estimate by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, if we hope to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the energy sector would have to leave more than $20 trillion worth of fossil fuels in the ground. “The oil and gas industry is doing everything they can to ensure they’re in business for the next 30 to 50 years and doing so at a time when we should be, as a nation, collectively figuring out how to stop using those same fossil fuels over the next ten years,” says Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.

Conflict between fossil fuel interests and environmentalists is inevitable. But as the contest becomes ever more stark, there seems to be little effort to distinguish between lawful political activism and illegal activities. The fossil fuel industry’s reasonable concerns about the strength of its political opponents have morphed into a kind of paranoia, one that threatens to criminalize constitutionally protected dissent.

In the years since the FBI and RCMP reports, unconventional oil and gas development has been met with sustained protest, from small scale tree sits and encampments to massive nationwide demonstrations. The opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is only the most high-profile example of resistance to the fossil fuel industry. The term “Blockadia” has been used to describe the loose network of citizens seeking to disrupt the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. Tactics vary depending on the region and political backdrop, but the emphasis has been on nonviolent civil disobedience, legal action, and ballot measures to hamper pipeline projects, ban fracking, and prevent or slow down tar sands extraction. A handful of pipeline projects ­– including Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and Williams Companies’ Constitution pipelines – have been stymied. In mid-December, after several years of intense organizing, lobbying, and direct action campaigns, New York became the first state with substantial shale gas reserves to ban fracking. Towns in Colorado, Texas, and Ohio have passed restrictions that limit oil and gas drilling.

Such successes have emboldened these groups and inspired action elsewhere. (Of course it should be noted that oil and gas development has hardly been halted; it continues apace throughout North America.) Rather than lead to an increase in criminal activity, as the FBI predicted, opposition to the oil and gas industry has, in some ways, become more mainstream. “Five years ago you would have never seen the faces of rural farmers and ranchers and tribal leaders on the front lines of climate actions,” says Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, an environmental group opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline. “This unlikely Cowboy and Indian Alliance that is also working shoulder to shoulder with big green groups is changing the way America looks at the issue of land, water, and climate change.”

But the new face of the environmental movement seems not to have registered with an industry intent on steamrolling its critics. In 2011, in comments that have been widely cited, a spokesman for Anadarko Petroleum described the anti-fracking movement as an “insurgency” and suggested that industry insiders download the US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as a guide to dealing with it. Less well known is the fact that Anadarko has built up a team of former intelligence operatives to combat what it views as an insurrection. The company’s southwest regional security manager was an officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was involved in undercover work. Another Anadarko security manager, LC Wilson, was regional commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2009 to 2011 and oversaw law enforcement statewide. Anadarko has also been involved in the creation of at least two Oilfield Crime Committees, one in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, both of which are headed by former law enforcement officials. The South Texas Oilfield Crime Committee and the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee have gathered intelligence on environmental activists and routinely exchange information with law enforcement.

Anadarko is not alone. Most large energy companies have security teams run by former FBI, Secret Service, or law enforcement personnel. The director of corporate security at Devon Energy, for example, was a special agent with the Secret Service for 14 years. Chevron’s chief security officer was the former head of the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. And BP’s head of Government and Political Affairs from 2007 to 2012 worked for MI6, Britain’s top spy agency.

In most cases these security teams have been deployed to manage crises overseas. In Indonesia, for example, ExxonMobil ran its own intelligence operations and consulted regularly with the country’s military leaders as it sought to protect its assets amid destabilizing political conditions. In 2012 The Guardian reported that Shell Oil maintained a 1,200-person police force plus a network of undercover informants in Nigeria and spent tens of millions of dollars on security in the region.

As shale oil and gas development has expanded in North America, the frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Range Resources, one of the largest drillers in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale, has admitted to hiring veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with experience in psychological warfare – or Psyops – to engage with local communities.

Even as the energy industry has beefed up its own in-house intelligence operations, it has established increasingly close ties with law enforcement agencies. This is partly a result of the post-9/11 national security state and the premium placed on information sharing. The Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC), established by the Department of Homeland Security in 2006, holds quarterly meetings to facilitate information sharing between the private sector and government agencies. (Meetings are exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which means there is no public oversight. Indeed, the Critical Infrastructure Information Act of 2002 stipulates that information voluntarily submitted by industry to the DHS or DOE is protected from public disclosure.) Within CIPAC there is an Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council and an Energy Government Coordinating Council. According to minutes from an August 2013 CIPAC meeting, the DHS has been working to provide more security clearances to the energy industry. “Currently DHS is working to enhance policies to share more classified information both cyber and non-cyber related,” the document states. Anadarko, Kinder Morgan, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute are frequent participants and sponsors of CIPAC meetings.

In addition to CIPAC there is a Homeland Security Information Sharing Network for the Oil and Gas Industry (HSIN-ONG), a web-based platform that allows companies to communicate with each other and with law enforcement. It also gives them access to Suspicious Activity Reports and other intelligence related information. Around the same time that the information-sharing network was being created, the Department of Justice launched its National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative to “improve the sharing of suspicious activity reports among state, local, tribal, and federal law-enforcement organizations, as well as private sector entities.”

Intelligence-sharing systems also have been developed at the state level. The Nebraska Information Analysis Center (one of more than 70 Homeland Security “fusion centers”) has its own network that focuses on “possible unlawful tactics and techniques of individuals/groups opposed to Keystone XL pipeline.” According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal through a public records request, oil infrastructure company TransCanada has its own page in the HSIN portal where suspicious activity reports can be posted. TransCanada representatives, FBI agents, county attorneys, local sheriffs, and the US assistant attorney general all have access to the Keystone pipeline network.

Despite the numerous federal, state, and regional information-sharing networks established during the past decade, the industry has been reluctant to participate in programs that might be subject to public oversight. Thus last summer the oil and gas industry announced the creation of its own information sharing and analysis center, or ISAC, which allows member companies to submit intelligence anonymously and is exempt from public disclosure.

The industry’s fear of transparency is part of a larger pattern. Oil and gas firms often express alarm about having their facilities photographed or filmed by citizen watchdogs, which can lead to official investigations. For example, in 2011 the Rocky Mountain Energy Security Group (yet another regional intelligence sharing network) issued a security report that described activists in Pavillion, Wyoming who had photographed a natural gas processing facility. The report, which was disseminated to law enforcement and security professionals in the industry, defined the behavior as “suspicious activity” and said that the information was being circulated in order to determine “whether the activity has any underlying criminal or terrorism nexus (or intent).”

In recent years the FBI has pursued environmental activists in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho for little more than taking photographs of oil and gas industry installations. In 2011, after receiving an anonymous tip, the FBI went after Texas activist Ben Kessler, a member of the direct action environmental group Rising Tide North America. In November 2013 and February 2014, a Pennsylvania state trooper and member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force visited anti-fracking activists at their homes in New York and Pennsylvania under the pretext that they had trespassed while taking photos of a gas compressor station. More recently, members of Rising Tide in the Pacific Northwest have been contacted or visited by FBI agents. (The energy companies’ fear of transparency is in some ways similar to the livestock industry’s exposé anxiety, which has led to the passage of so-called ag-gag laws that prohibit the filming of farms and ranches.)

The frontlines of the energy wars are no longer overseas, but rather in places like Nebraska, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

But what happens when the private sector’s assumptions about criminal activity are wrong or misleading? In Pennsylvania the oil and gas industry has driven speculation that environmental organizations were behind several acts of vandalism at or near drilling sites, even though there’s no evidence of any link whatsoever. The unfounded assertion has spilled into the local press. In February 2014, The Williamsport Sun-Gazette in northeast Pennsylvania ran a story about the crimes headlined, “Ecoterror Target: Gas companies bolster security in response to threats.”

Jeff Monaghan, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario who writes on issues of surveillance, says the RCMP document reflects how deeply intertwined the suspicions of energy companies and intelligence agencies have become. “The broader context of this document is a very, very close working relationship between the Critical Infrastructure Protection team and the energy corporations. As the relationship develops the underlying belief is that environmentalists are first-and-foremost a threat to the economy. It’s really about protecting shared values of economic growth.”

Or, as the RCMP report put it, “Canada’s economic growth … and the objectives of environmentalists are in direct conflict.” Environmental activists wouldn’t disagree with that, especially given the aggressive pro-energy policies of the Harper government. What they take issue with is the highly provocative claim that their opposition to the energy industry will likely lead to criminal activity. As the interests of the state and energy sector become increasingly close, however, this perception is taking hold. Activists worry that it is shaping law enforcement’s approach to the movement and could lead to a crackdown on legal protest.

“It doesn’t surprise me that the industry is trying really hard to paint the environmental movement as fringe or dangerous, because it’s their last resort,” says Catskill Mountainkeeper’s Gillingham. “It’s behavior based on a losing argument.”

The conflict over the Keystone XL pipeline has reinforced the narrative that economic prosperity and environmental protection are mutually exclusive. Pipeline proponents like to paint the opposition as job killers and, yes, extremists. In April 2014, Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, described the pipeline as “a project that is being blocked purely by environmental extremism.” More recently, US Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, called anti-fracking activists campaigning for a moratorium “radical environmentalists.” A major Washington PR firm, Berman and Co., has launched an ad campaign bankrolled by the energy industry called “Big Green Radicals” that seeks to smear high-profile activists.

But the demonization of environmental advocates goes far beyond mere polemics. TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, has worked closely with law enforcement along the proposed pipeline route from the very early stages of its development. A certain amount of collaboration with law enforcement is to be expected with any major infrastructure project. But TransCanada has gone further. The company has pressured attorneys general to prosecute environmental activists under terrorism statutes. It has given local law enforcement advance notice of meetings with landowners whom the company describes as hostile. And the company has held workshops with local law enforcement and the FBI, including a daylong “strategy meeting” in Oklahoma with the FBI in 2012.

According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, the FBI distributed a bulletin in early 2013 “regarding threat concerns by environmental extremists against the Keystone Pipeline expansion project” to law enforcement across Nebraska. In its strategic plan for 2014-2017, South Dakota Homeland Security identifies what it considers to be extremist enclaves in the state, through which Keystone is proposed to pass. According to the document, “Uranium mining in the southwest part of the state and a proposed oil pipeline in the western part of the state garnered the attention of extremist environmental groups.” The report does not describe or name the groups, their intentions, or tactics. A public records request for additional documents or communication regarding “extremist environmental groups” in South Dakota was denied.

In 2013 Earth Island Journalreported on the infiltration of a Tar Sands Resistance training camp in Oklahoma. Two undercover officers from the Bryan County Sheriff’s office attended the weeklong event and shared intelligence with the Oklahoma Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center. Law enforcement was tipped off and a planned act of civil disobedience was preempted. During that same week TransCanada’s corporate security advisor was in frequent contact with the Oklahoma Fusion Center and made comments on a classified situational awareness bulletin.

In many ways Texas, where the Keystone pipeilne would terminate, is the heart of the American oil and gas industry. Not surprisingly, activists there are routinely harassed by law enforcement and corporate security for nothing more than keeping tabs on the industry. In East Houston, the city’s industrial hub and most polluted neighborhood (Houston itself is one of the most polluted cities in the country), environmental activist and community organizer Bryan Parras has been questioned by the police on several occasions and once was contacted by a Coast Guard special agent assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Houston. The organization he helps run with his father, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (or TEJAS), has been closely watched. Parras frequently takes activists and journalists on what he calls “toxic tours” – a survey of the neighborhood’s refineries, chemical plants, and shipping ports. He’s made a point of documenting the air pollution caused by the flaring at the refineries that flank the neighborhood. He says the images “compel people to action.”

They’ve also made Parras a subject of interest for industry and law enforcement. He is routinely questioned by the police or harassed by security representatives from Valero Energy, a major refining company and one of the industries Parras monitors. In 2013 Parras got a text from a friend, Tish Stringer, saying that an agent had visited her home and wanted to know about her relationship with him. The Coast Guard special agent, David Pileggi, told Stringer he’d been tipped off by Valero.

“It’s nothing new,” Parras says. “Since 9/11 we’ve been harassed repeatedly and pulled over for taking pictures or video of the facilities.”

In an emailed statement, Bill Day, vice president of communications at Valero, said the Houston refinery is designated by Homeland Security as “critical infrastructure” and therefore must meet enhanced security requirements. “One of those requirements,” he wrote, “is that when we see people taking photos or video of our facilities, we ascertain the purpose of that activity and then report it to DHS.” According to Shauna Dunlap, media coordinator for the FBI’s Houston Division, photographing and videotaping of critical infrastructures “can be a precursor of potential criminal activity.” The Joint Terrorism Task Force, she says, is “obligated to look into each and every suspicious activity report.”

This kind of surveillance and intimidation, Parras says, is particularly chilling in an area with a large number of undocumented residents. Not only are they vulnerable to threats of deportation, but also they’re quite literally at the crossroads of environmental destruction and the risks associated with climate change. East Houston is home to a disproportionate number of the city’s largest sources of industrial pollution, four major highways, and the shipping channel that feeds into the Port of Houston. If built, the Keystone XL pipeline would terminate in East Houston; Valero has a contract with TransCanada to receive most of the oil. “On the basis of location alone these neighborhoods appear far more vulnerable to health risks than others in Greater Houston,” a 2006 study commissioned by the mayor’s office concluded. In addition, rising sea levels threaten to inundate the heavily industrialized shoreline. “It puts us at even higher risk because we’re on the coast,” says Parras. “All these facilities are right on the water.”

In many ways, for activists like Parras the last line of defense lies in taking photos, documenting the impacts of industrial pollution, and simply bearing witness. TEJAS hasn’t even engaged in civil disobedience or direct action, he says. Still, his organization is on Valero’s watch list. TEJAS organizers have been followed and photographed or videoed by Valero security personnel. Local teachers who joined Parras on one of his toxic tours were bullied into deleting photos and video they had taken of the refinery. Journalists he has shown around have been threatened by Valero that they’ll be reported to the FBI.

In the eyes of the oil and gas industry this is the new environmental extremism. And that view is being shared with law enforcement at every level.

The intimidation and surveillance have had an impact. Parras says his advocacy has been compromised by Valero’s scrutiny of his organization and the refinery’s close relationship with law enforcement. “It’s difficult to get neighbors to want to engage and speak out,” he says.

Latest guidelines mark the first time the government has intervened to enact protections to limit risks.

The new rules announced Friday by the Obama administration governing how energy companies frack for oil and gas on federal lands managed to anger environmentalists and the industry alike, but represent a significant step toward protecting drinking water resources in some of the most heavily drilled parts of the country.

The rules mark the first time the federal government has stepped in to enact protections to limit risks posed by a technology that has been both criticized for causing environmental harm and credited with making the nation one of the leading producers of oil and gas.

Fracking involves injecting large volumes of water, sand and toxic chemicals underground with explosive force that fractures the rock and helps it release trapped hydrocarbons. It has been associated with water and air pollution almost every place that it is practiced, and become a lighting rod for environmental opposition to domestic energy production. ProPublica has been covering issues related to fracking since 2008, including the gaps in federal oversight and the government’s consideration of ways to address it.

The rules exclude drilling on private land and apply only to lands or mineral resources directly managed by the U.S. Department of Interior, including tribal lands, which make up a relative minority of all the wells drilled in the United States. They fall short of some of the most stringent fracking regulations already in place in some states, but establish a baseline of best practices and update arcane federal drilling rules almost three decades old.

“Many of the regulations on the books at the Interior Department have not kept pace with advances in technology and modern drilling methods,” said Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior and a former petroleum engineer, in her statement announcing the new policy. “Our decades-old regulations do not contemplate current techniques in which hydraulic fracturing is increasingly complex.”

The new rules promise to improve basic protections for drinking water by requiring drilling procedures that have long been standard on waste injection wells used by the drilling industry, but which have not been applied to new oil and gas wells used to extract resources.

They are lengthy and complicated, but an initial review of documents released by the Interior Department shows they address four important areas:

They will require drilling companies to encase their wells in cement through vulnerable areas where they could leak into groundwater, and will require testing of that cement to ensure it is properly in place.

Pressure tests, called mechanical integrity tests, will be required in order to confirm that the wells can contain the extraordinary forces of fracking, before the fracking process itself can be performed.

A geological analysis of a well site will be required before fracking takes place, so that the reach of those fractures and their potential to intersect with water sources or other wells can be predicted.

The temporary use of open waste pits – large ponds containing water and pollutants removed from the wells after fracking – will be prohibited except in rare circumstances.

These core requirements directly address many of the known causes of water pollution associated with new drilling efforts and fracking across the country. Where methane and other pollutants have escaped wells into water supplies, it has often been because the cement encapsulation of the wells was incomplete, or the pressure of fracking caused them to fail. Waste pits have been documented sources of drinking water contamination in hundreds of cases.

There are other components to the rules as well. They will enhance transparency by establishing a record of tests and making public details about which wells are fracked and what condition those wells are in. Drillers will also be required to release more information about what chemicals they inject underground.

Still, the rules are unlikely to satisfy some of the industry’s most ardent critics, in large part because they are less stringent than versions that the government had been considering earlier in its drafting process, and they fall short of what several states already do to oversee fracking. Among other issues, they continue to allow drilling companies to protect trade secrets and not disclose all of the chemicals they use to the public or to doctors.

Some see the rules as both a welcome acknowledgement that the environmental risks of fracking need to be addressed and as a missed opportunity.

“The bottom line is: these rules fail to protect the nation’s public lands—home to our last wild places, and sources of drinking water for millions of people—from the risks of fracking,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “More than ever, this underscores the urgent need to get better protections in place around the country.”

Latest guidelines mark the first time the government has intervened to enact protections to limit risks.

The new rules announced Friday by the Obama administration governing how energy companies frack for oil and gas on federal lands managed to anger environmentalists and the industry alike, but represent a significant step toward protecting drinking water resources in some of the most heavily drilled parts of the country.

The rules mark the first time the federal government has stepped in to enact protections to limit risks posed by a technology that has been both criticized for causing environmental harm and credited with making the nation one of the leading producers of oil and gas.

Fracking involves injecting large volumes of water, sand and toxic chemicals underground with explosive force that fractures the rock and helps it release trapped hydrocarbons. It has been associated with water and air pollution almost every place that it is practiced, and become a lighting rod for environmental opposition to domestic energy production. ProPublica has been covering issues related to fracking since 2008, including the gaps in federal oversight and the government’s consideration of ways to address it.

The rules exclude drilling on private land and apply only to lands or mineral resources directly managed by the U.S. Department of Interior, including tribal lands, which make up a relative minority of all the wells drilled in the United States. They fall short of some of the most stringent fracking regulations already in place in some states, but establish a baseline of best practices and update arcane federal drilling rules almost three decades old.

“Many of the regulations on the books at the Interior Department have not kept pace with advances in technology and modern drilling methods,” said Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior and a former petroleum engineer, in her statement announcing the new policy. “Our decades-old regulations do not contemplate current techniques in which hydraulic fracturing is increasingly complex.”

The new rules promise to improve basic protections for drinking water by requiring drilling procedures that have long been standard on waste injection wells used by the drilling industry, but which have not been applied to new oil and gas wells used to extract resources.

They are lengthy and complicated, but an initial review of documents released by the Interior Department shows they address four important areas:

They will require drilling companies to encase their wells in cement through vulnerable areas where they could leak into groundwater, and will require testing of that cement to ensure it is properly in place.

Pressure tests, called mechanical integrity tests, will be required in order to confirm that the wells can contain the extraordinary forces of fracking, before the fracking process itself can be performed.

A geological analysis of a well site will be required before fracking takes place, so that the reach of those fractures and their potential to intersect with water sources or other wells can be predicted.

The temporary use of open waste pits – large ponds containing water and pollutants removed from the wells after fracking – will be prohibited except in rare circumstances.

These core requirements directly address many of the known causes of water pollution associated with new drilling efforts and fracking across the country. Where methane and other pollutants have escaped wells into water supplies, it has often been because the cement encapsulation of the wells was incomplete, or the pressure of fracking caused them to fail. Waste pits have been documented sources of drinking water contamination in hundreds of cases.

There are other components to the rules as well. They will enhance transparency by establishing a record of tests and making public details about which wells are fracked and what condition those wells are in. Drillers will also be required to release more information about what chemicals they inject underground.

Still, the rules are unlikely to satisfy some of the industry’s most ardent critics, in large part because they are less stringent than versions that the government had been considering earlier in its drafting process, and they fall short of what several states already do to oversee fracking. Among other issues, they continue to allow drilling companies to protect trade secrets and not disclose all of the chemicals they use to the public or to doctors.

Some see the rules as both a welcome acknowledgement that the environmental risks of fracking need to be addressed and as a missed opportunity.

“The bottom line is: these rules fail to protect the nation’s public lands—home to our last wild places, and sources of drinking water for millions of people—from the risks of fracking,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “More than ever, this underscores the urgent need to get better protections in place around the country.”

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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/fracking-company-sues-ohio-village-their-water$600 Million Fracking Company Sues Tiny Ohio Town for Its Waterhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/87617461/0/alternet_fracking~Million-Fracking-Company-Sues-Tiny-Ohio-Town-for-Its-Water

Gulfport Energy is suing Barnesville, Ohio.

A massive fracking company, Gulfport Energy, an oil and natural gas exploration and production company worth $600 million, is suing a small Ohio town for its water. Gulfport filed a lawsuit against the village of Barnesville (pop. 5,000) claiming the town violated an agreement to provide water from its reservoir.

Barnesville recently entered another contract with a company named Antero Resources. Gulfport believes the town is violating its previous contract by allowing a new company to use more water than Gulfport is allowed to.

There’s a huge problem with this argument: the town admits it cut off Gulfport’s withdrawals before, but it did so last year when Gulfport was the only company using the water, therefore it seems illogical to blame it on the new contract. The area’s Slope Creek Reservoir supplies water to all the residents of Barnesville as well as thousands of other people in nearby towns.

David Castle, a spokesman for a group known as the Concerned Barnesville Area Residents, said frackers had been drawing water from the reservoir until officials told them to stop last fall because the water level dropped so low.

"It's been a tremendous source of concern for the community. We sent a petition signed by 2,500 people to Gulfport asking them to move their drilling pads farther away from the reservoir," Castle said.

The massive drilling boom in Ohio has increased concern about safety issues connected to fracking. 25 families were forced to leave their homes last year after a natural gas leak began at a fracking well. Attempts to stop fracking in the area have proved to be a massive challenge, as the EPA lacks authority and the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that towns can’t ban the practice through law.

A massive fracking company, Gulfport Energy, an oil and natural gas exploration and production company worth $600 million, is suing a small Ohio town for its water. Gulfport filed a lawsuit against the village of Barnesville (pop. 5,000) claiming the town violated an agreement to provide water from its reservoir.

Barnesville recently entered another contract with a company named Antero Resources. Gulfport believes the town is violating its previous contract by allowing a new company to use more water than Gulfport is allowed to.

There’s a huge problem with this argument: the town admits it cut off Gulfport’s withdrawals before, but it did so last year when Gulfport was the only company using the water, therefore it seems illogical to blame it on the new contract. The area’s Slope Creek Reservoir supplies water to all the residents of Barnesville as well as thousands of other people in nearby towns.

David Castle, a spokesman for a group known as the Concerned Barnesville Area Residents, said frackers had been drawing water from the reservoir until officials told them to stop last fall because the water level dropped so low.

"It's been a tremendous source of concern for the community. We sent a petition signed by 2,500 people to Gulfport asking them to move their drilling pads farther away from the reservoir," Castle said.

The massive drilling boom in Ohio has increased concern about safety issues connected to fracking. 25 families were forced to leave their homes last year after a natural gas leak began at a fracking well. Attempts to stop fracking in the area have proved to be a massive challenge, as the EPA lacks authority and the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that towns can’t ban the practice through law.

Adding to the already lengthy list of reasons to be concerned about the disposal of oil industry wastewater in California, the Center for Biological Diversity says it has found dangerous levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene and toluene in fracking flowback.

Flowback is a fluid that floats up to the surface of fracked wells that contains clays, dissolved metal ions and total dissolved solids (such as salt) in addition to chemical additives used in the fracking process.

As such, flowback is a component of oil industry wastewater, and one of the chief reasons why the wastewater must be disposed of in a very cautious manner.

In California, where the toxic and cancer-causing chemicals were found to be present in flowback by the CBD, oil industry wastewater is not, unfortunately, disposed of in a cautious manner.

Wastewater is also sometimes stored in pits, but again, California regulators have failed to enforce proper safeguards. Clean Water Action released a report last year detailing thethreat to California's air and water from the open, unlined pits used to store much of the oil industry's toxic wastewater. According to the report, at least 432 of these pits are currently in use in California, most of them operating with an expired permit or no permit at all.

“Cancer-causing chemicals are surfacing in fracking flowback fluid just as we learn that the California oil industry is disposing of wastewater in hundreds of illegal disposal wells and open pits,” said Hollin Kretzmann, the CBD lawyer who conducted the analysis. “Gov. Brown needs to shut down all the illegal wells immediately and ban fracking to fight this devastating threat to California’s water supply.”

It wasn’t just the chemicals Kretzmann found in fracking flowback that are a cause for concern, either. Laxe enforcement of reporting rules make it hard to determine the true extent of the problem, though the CBD still found enough to raise serious questions about the threats flowback fluid poses to public health:

• High chromium-6 levels: Chromium-6 was found in fracking flowback at levels up to 2,700 times the recommended level set by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

• Missing reports: At least 100 fracking flowback tests are missing from the reporting website managed by California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, in violation of state law.

• Missing benzene data: Only 329 of the 479 fracking fluid chemical tests on the state oil agency’s website measured for benzene.

*bull; Benzene common: Of those 329 chemical tests that measured for benzene, 323 detected benzene while only six did not.

• Dangerous toluene levels: Toluene, a toxin that can affect the central nervous system and harm developing fetuses, was found to exceed federal-mandated limits for drinking water 118 times.

In some cases, benzene levels in fracking flowback were over 1,500 times the level the federal government says is safe for drinking water. Both chromium-6 and benzene are known carcinogens.

California is the country’s third-largest oil producing state, with some 20% of its oil production coming from fracked wells, according to a recent study that also found that half of all new wells drilled in the past decade use fracking.

Adding to the already lengthy list of reasons to be concerned about the disposal of oil industry wastewater in California, the Center for Biological Diversity says it has found dangerous levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene and toluene in fracking flowback.

Flowback is a fluid that floats up to the surface of fracked wells that contains clays, dissolved metal ions and total dissolved solids (such as salt) in addition to chemical additives used in the fracking process.

As such, flowback is a component of oil industry wastewater, and one of the chief reasons why the wastewater must be disposed of in a very cautious manner.

In California, where the toxic and cancer-causing chemicals were found to be present in flowback by the CBD, oil industry wastewater is not, unfortunately, disposed of in a cautious manner.

Wastewater is also sometimes stored in pits, but again, California regulators have failed to enforce proper safeguards. Clean Water Action released a report last year detailing thethreat to California's air and water from the open, unlined pits used to store much of the oil industry's toxic wastewater. According to the report, at least 432 of these pits are currently in use in California, most of them operating with an expired permit or no permit at all.

“Cancer-causing chemicals are surfacing in fracking flowback fluid just as we learn that the California oil industry is disposing of wastewater in hundreds of illegal disposal wells and open pits,” said Hollin Kretzmann, the CBD lawyer who conducted the analysis. “Gov. Brown needs to shut down all the illegal wells immediately and ban fracking to fight this devastating threat to California’s water supply.”

It wasn’t just the chemicals Kretzmann found in fracking flowback that are a cause for concern, either. Laxe enforcement of reporting rules make it hard to determine the true extent of the problem, though the CBD still found enough to raise serious questions about the threats flowback fluid poses to public health:

• High chromium-6 levels: Chromium-6 was found in fracking flowback at levels up to 2,700 times the recommended level set by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

• Missing reports: At least 100 fracking flowback tests are missing from the reporting website managed by California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, in violation of state law.

• Missing benzene data: Only 329 of the 479 fracking fluid chemical tests on the state oil agency’s website measured for benzene.

*bull; Benzene common: Of those 329 chemical tests that measured for benzene, 323 detected benzene while only six did not.

• Dangerous toluene levels: Toluene, a toxin that can affect the central nervous system and harm developing fetuses, was found to exceed federal-mandated limits for drinking water 118 times.

In some cases, benzene levels in fracking flowback were over 1,500 times the level the federal government says is safe for drinking water. Both chromium-6 and benzene are known carcinogens.

California is the country’s third-largest oil producing state, with some 20% of its oil production coming from fracked wells, according to a recent study that also found that half of all new wells drilled in the past decade use fracking.

California Rep Jeff Denham slows the review of deadly cargo to a halt.

“I just want to make sure that we are all singing the same tune that we have a very safe industry and we want to work together on improving that industry.”

Those were the words of Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials on February 3rd at a hearing titled “How the Changing Energy Markets Will Affect U.S. Transportation.” He was directing this advice to Greg Saxton, chief engineer for rail tank car manufacturer Greenbrier.

Denham obviously had a bone to pick with Saxton because prior to the hearing the Modesto Bee, a newspaper in Denham’s home district, ran an editorial making a strong case that the existing tank cars used to transport crude oil are unsafe. The editorial, “Delays on safer rail cars are unacceptable,” didn’t mince words. It was clear on what should happen: “The DOT [Department of Transportation] should adopt rules for those cars then set deadlines to replace every single tank car in America. Our elected representatives should insist on it.”

In Modesto, the elected representative who should be insisting on that is Jeff Denham.

Modesto is also home to Greenbrier’s manufacturing facilities and the editorial quoted Saxton for its conclusion noting his position on the lack of new regulations. “We just need a decision. Twenty years is too long.”

This is not the tune that Chairman Denham wants everyone to be singing. In his comments to Saxton at the hearing he explained his intent.

“I’m making sure that the wrong people are not talking to the Ed boards across the country that would give a wrong perception of our current situation.”

Apparently Saxton is one of the “wrong people” to talk to editorial boards because of his insistence on adhering to the facts. Denham went on to explain what he wants the American public to hear, while of course taking a shot at the Obama administration for good measure.

Rep. Denham said:

“I want to make sure as the administration drags their feet or reorganizes or does some shuffling that there is not a misperception out there in the American public that a) that our current tank cars are not safe, that our industry does not have a safe record and, most importantly, that there is not some magic quick fast track to get all of these new tank cars online very, very quickly.”

Where would the American public get the “misperception” that current oil-by-rail tank cars aren’t safe? Perhaps from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has raised concerns repeatedly about the DOT-111 tank cars for the last 20 years.

This year, the NTSB added the issue of rail tank car safety to its Most Wanted List of items to improve transportation safety. Last year, an NTSB board member testified that using theDOT-111 rail cars to transport crude oil posed an “unacceptable public risk.”

The American public may also have noticed that a couple days after Denham’s talk about telling the American public that rail tank cars are safe, a train carrying ethanol derailed, rail cars were punctured, caught fire and spilled ethanol into the Mississippi River.

The main argument Denham and the oil and rail industries are making is that it just isn’t possible to replace all of the DOT-111 cars on the schedule proposed by the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Meanwhile, Saxton, the chief engineer at the largest tank car manufacturer claims the industry can meet the deadlines, a point Greenbrier has made throughout the past year regarding this issue and one that is included in the proposed regulations from July 2014. This isn’t a new idea.

As reported on DeSmog almost a year ago, the reason the industry is fighting against these timelines to replace the cars is that they need the cars to meet the increasing industry demand to move crude by rail. Instead of replacing the old unsafe cars, the industry wants to simply add any new cars to the fleet that is moving crude oil.

In this debate — and the debate on what to do about the explosive nature of the Bakken crude oil moved in the DOT-111’s — the industry and its champions in congress like Rep. Denham, continue to engage in finger-pointing and obfuscation to make it appear like these claims are reasonable.

“I know that you have a PR [public relations] staff that is very busy working with a lot of op-ed boards around the country,” Denham said to Saxton, “So as they continue to have those discussions I want to make sure they are dealing with some factual information.”

Rep. Denham did not go on to provide any factual information to dispute Saxton’s claims. What he did was use an example to try to make his case that ignored the facts.

“125,000 tanks cars in the fleet currently today. You have the capacity to build how many… 8,000 a year?” Denham asked Saxton, who confirmed that this was true. “So if you were building 8,000 a year the backlog would be about a decade.”

Although Denham’s “about a decade math” is shaky based on the numbers he was using (125/8=15.6), the industry wants a decade to replace the dangerous rail cars, so that is the answer they always get when they do their math.

However, the whole premise is completely misleading. The facts are that no one is saying that 125,000 tank cars need to be replaced and the rail tank car industry has a much greater capacity than 8,000 cars per year.

The proposed regulations note that there are currently 22,800 non-jacketed DOT-111 tank cars in use for crude oil, and an additional 5,500 jacketed DOT-111’s.

The current industry capacity for new rail tank car production is 35,000 per year.

So when Rep. Denham says “I want to see some numbers” — he is bluffing because he knows that the numbers tell a far different story than the tune he is singing.

At the Feb. 3 hearing, Denham’s behavior illustrated again how these public hearings are merely public relations spectacles designed to send an industry-approved message to the American public.

Meanwhile, the real discussions about the new regulations are happening in private meetings between industry and its regulators. In these private meetings the industry lobbies against new tank cars, new braking systems, making the oil safer, and any speed limits for the trains.

Rep. Denham wants the American public to believe there isn’t “some magic quick fast track” way to replace the unsafe tank cars and that it is going to take a decade.

The reality is that the industry has the capacity to replace the tank cars on the timeline in the proposed regulations and there is no need to wait a decade to address this “unacceptable public risk.”

But since doing that would cut into industry profits, the industry and its representatives in congress maintain this is “unattainable.”

They’re singing from the same songbook, and that should scare every American living near the bomb train blast zone.

California Rep Jeff Denham slows the review of deadly cargo to a halt.

“I just want to make sure that we are all singing the same tune that we have a very safe industry and we want to work together on improving that industry.”

Those were the words of Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials on February 3rd at a hearing titled “How the Changing Energy Markets Will Affect U.S. Transportation.” He was directing this advice to Greg Saxton, chief engineer for rail tank car manufacturer Greenbrier.

Denham obviously had a bone to pick with Saxton because prior to the hearing the Modesto Bee, a newspaper in Denham’s home district, ran an editorial making a strong case that the existing tank cars used to transport crude oil are unsafe. The editorial, “Delays on safer rail cars are unacceptable,” didn’t mince words. It was clear on what should happen: “The DOT [Department of Transportation] should adopt rules for those cars then set deadlines to replace every single tank car in America. Our elected representatives should insist on it.”

In Modesto, the elected representative who should be insisting on that is Jeff Denham.

Modesto is also home to Greenbrier’s manufacturing facilities and the editorial quoted Saxton for its conclusion noting his position on the lack of new regulations. “We just need a decision. Twenty years is too long.”

This is not the tune that Chairman Denham wants everyone to be singing. In his comments to Saxton at the hearing he explained his intent.

“I’m making sure that the wrong people are not talking to the Ed boards across the country that would give a wrong perception of our current situation.”

Apparently Saxton is one of the “wrong people” to talk to editorial boards because of his insistence on adhering to the facts. Denham went on to explain what he wants the American public to hear, while of course taking a shot at the Obama administration for good measure.

Rep. Denham said:

“I want to make sure as the administration drags their feet or reorganizes or does some shuffling that there is not a misperception out there in the American public that a) that our current tank cars are not safe, that our industry does not have a safe record and, most importantly, that there is not some magic quick fast track to get all of these new tank cars online very, very quickly.”

Where would the American public get the “misperception” that current oil-by-rail tank cars aren’t safe? Perhaps from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has raised concerns repeatedly about the DOT-111 tank cars for the last 20 years.

This year, the NTSB added the issue of rail tank car safety to its Most Wanted List of items to improve transportation safety. Last year, an NTSB board member testified that using theDOT-111 rail cars to transport crude oil posed an “unacceptable public risk.”

The American public may also have noticed that a couple days after Denham’s talk about telling the American public that rail tank cars are safe, a train carrying ethanol derailed, rail cars were punctured, caught fire and spilled ethanol into the Mississippi River.

The main argument Denham and the oil and rail industries are making is that it just isn’t possible to replace all of the DOT-111 cars on the schedule proposed by the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Meanwhile, Saxton, the chief engineer at the largest tank car manufacturer claims the industry can meet the deadlines, a point Greenbrier has made throughout the past year regarding this issue and one that is included in the proposed regulations from July 2014. This isn’t a new idea.

As reported on DeSmog almost a year ago, the reason the industry is fighting against these timelines to replace the cars is that they need the cars to meet the increasing industry demand to move crude by rail. Instead of replacing the old unsafe cars, the industry wants to simply add any new cars to the fleet that is moving crude oil.

In this debate — and the debate on what to do about the explosive nature of the Bakken crude oil moved in the DOT-111’s — the industry and its champions in congress like Rep. Denham, continue to engage in finger-pointing and obfuscation to make it appear like these claims are reasonable.

“I know that you have a PR [public relations] staff that is very busy working with a lot of op-ed boards around the country,” Denham said to Saxton, “So as they continue to have those discussions I want to make sure they are dealing with some factual information.”

Rep. Denham did not go on to provide any factual information to dispute Saxton’s claims. What he did was use an example to try to make his case that ignored the facts.

“125,000 tanks cars in the fleet currently today. You have the capacity to build how many… 8,000 a year?” Denham asked Saxton, who confirmed that this was true. “So if you were building 8,000 a year the backlog would be about a decade.”

Although Denham’s “about a decade math” is shaky based on the numbers he was using (125/8=15.6), the industry wants a decade to replace the dangerous rail cars, so that is the answer they always get when they do their math.

However, the whole premise is completely misleading. The facts are that no one is saying that 125,000 tank cars need to be replaced and the rail tank car industry has a much greater capacity than 8,000 cars per year.

The proposed regulations note that there are currently 22,800 non-jacketed DOT-111 tank cars in use for crude oil, and an additional 5,500 jacketed DOT-111’s.

The current industry capacity for new rail tank car production is 35,000 per year.

So when Rep. Denham says “I want to see some numbers” — he is bluffing because he knows that the numbers tell a far different story than the tune he is singing.

At the Feb. 3 hearing, Denham’s behavior illustrated again how these public hearings are merely public relations spectacles designed to send an industry-approved message to the American public.

Meanwhile, the real discussions about the new regulations are happening in private meetings between industry and its regulators. In these private meetings the industry lobbies against new tank cars, new braking systems, making the oil safer, and any speed limits for the trains.

Rep. Denham wants the American public to believe there isn’t “some magic quick fast track” way to replace the unsafe tank cars and that it is going to take a decade.

The reality is that the industry has the capacity to replace the tank cars on the timeline in the proposed regulations and there is no need to wait a decade to address this “unacceptable public risk.”

But since doing that would cut into industry profits, the industry and its representatives in congress maintain this is “unattainable.”

They’re singing from the same songbook, and that should scare every American living near the bomb train blast zone.

Two short years ago, industry analysts and television pundits were toasting North Dakota as the “Saudi Arabia of North America.” But the fracking rush that made the Peace Garden State the poster child of the U.S. energy boom has gone bust.

North Dakota’s numerous gas flares, which have been notably visible from space, are flickering out as drilling rigs shut down and tens of thousands of energy workers face reduced hours and pink slips. Small North Dakota towns recently bustling with workers and other fortune seekers are returning to the rural tranquility they once knew.

So why has fracking slipped into hibernation? Depends who you ask. Many industry analysts say fracking is a victim of its own success, helping to drive oil prices so low it was no longer affordable to frack new wells. Others point to the drop in global demand, spurred by a slowdown in the Chinese economy, alternative energies and an American public that’s not only driving more fuel-efficient cars, but driving less. Most popular, perhaps, is the theory that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, purposely sabotaged the U.S. fracking industry by maintaining its current production levels while global oil demand falls, causing prices to spiral downward.

But fracking is expensive. While much depends on geology and geography, fracking companies need to fetch prices between $55 and $100 a barrel just to break even. As the price of oil is now at $44 a barrel — and threatening to drop even further — it makes little sense to develop or even operate these sites, many run by relatively small energy companies. Meanwhile, many OPEC nations, which mostly rely on less expensive and conventional extraction methods, can still continue making profits even at $30-35 a barrel.

So, while the demise of fracking is a story of supply and demand, it is also a story about how OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia, has responded to the threat U.S. oil production presents to its preeminence in the global market. OPEC is flexing some muscle, showing the world that it’s willing to wait out a short-term plunge in prices while the thousands of Lilliputian fracking operations that challenge its dominance shut down or fail.

Roughly a third of U.S. fracking operations are now too cost prohibitive to continue, say economists. Lending to companies for fracking operations has stopped and investors may not come back even if oil prices are high enough for them to make meager profits.

“Smart people don’t invest in things that break even,” says energy expert Arthur Berman on Oilprice.com. “Why should I take a risk to make no money on an energy company when I can invest in a variable annuity or a REIT that has almost no risk that will pay me a reasonable margin? So are companies OK at current oil prices? Hell no! They are dying at these prices.”

Of course, many wells are not fracked for oil but for natural gas, but dropping prices for natural gas is affecting production in the Marcellus Shale. Wholesale natural gas prices have dropped from about $13.42 per million BTU in 2005 to about $2.85 today and are still dropping thanks to a milder than normal winter in the Northeast. At those prices, the incentive to justify further investment in fracking operations in the Marcellus Shale is vaporizing.

However, unlike with oil, natural gas fracked in Northeastern states is much less expensive to produce than natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico and Canada. So it's unlikely that currently operating wells in the shale will suffer much from falling natural gas prices.

Not even Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent decision to ban fracking in New York enticed speculators to push prices upward. New York was never going to be a big player in fracking, as the state’s available reserves in the shale are minuscule compared to West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Many companies that leased land in New York for fracking decided to pull out, as the high costs of starting up would eat away at any profit. Energy companies have become more gun shy as existing local and state-imposed limitations make nearly two-thirds of the viable land unavailable to be fracked.

Pipeline to Nowhere?

While Congress is pinning its hopes that the Keystone XL pipeline expansion will bring a jobs boom to middle America, cheap oil prices are also threatening this controversial project. The business case for building the 1,179 pipeline just isn’t there. Not only is tar-sands oil from Canada much more expensive to extract (around $74 a barrel), it's more expensive to transport, whether by rail or pipeline.

Tar-sands oil is also not attractive to refiners as it's much harder to convert into transportation fuels, so it typically sells for $20 a barrel less than the North Dakota’s Bakken Crude and $30 less per barrel than Texas crude. The State Department’s study on the Keystone XL pipeline determined that if overall oil prices dropped between $65 and $75, it would erase the profits of tar sands extraction. So at today’s even lower oil prices, it’s all but worthless today, as would be the pipeline.

However, TransCanada, the pipeline’s builders, and supporters say Keystone XL is a long-term investment and they are unfazed by commodity prices.

Some independent analysts, however, say that TransCanada is being overly optimistic and that investors won’t put up with years of losses, or even the notion that the pipeline could become a stone around the neck of TransCanada should OPEC choose to manipulate prices again. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy research says there are many questions about the viability of the pipeline.

The High Price of Low Gas Prices

While American consumers and businesses might enjoy the lower oil and natural gas prices, there is a dark side to this windfall. As shale exploration is all but dead, and most of it was funded by some $200 billion in bonds and other borrowings, there’s concern that this money will never be paid back, and such losses could lead to major adjustments, possibly even a collapse of the global financial markets similar to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the housing market bubble in 2008.

Low oil prices are already taking their toll on Alaska, which has an economy largely based on fossil-fuel extraction. While only about 20% of Alaska’s wells are fracked, oil production is even more expensive than in western Canada and in North Dakota, costing as much as $78 a barrel to produce.

Alaska has no income or sales tax and virtually funds itself from taxing crude oil. The state’s residents have become used to receiving annual checks from a $51 billion fund from these taxes. Alaska budgeted on the assumption that oil would be about $100 a barrel throughout 2015. But the state will have to dip into its rainy day fund to keep from going belly up, and investment ratings agencies say Alaska will blow through that fund quickly.

“The oil plunge caught them off guard, and now they are trying to recalibrate,” said Ted Hampton, an analyst at Moody’s Investment Services, which downgraded Alaska’s credit rating from “stable” to “negative” in December 2014.

But Alaska doesn’t seem convinced that low crude oil prices are here to stay. While drastic budget cuts and dipping into emergency funds is the plan for the next two years, the state’s acting revenue commissioner, Marcia Davis, is forecasting better days in 2017, with oil prices back to above $90 a barrel.

North Dakota doesn’t rely on funds from fossil-fuel extraction to keep the lights on in Bismarck, so it's better protected from such large swings in oil prices. Still, the loss of oil royalties, taxes on crude oil and taxes collected on oil workers will leave it several billion behind on its revenue projections this year.

The Fracking Undead

Back in November, Russian oil baron Leonid Fedun predicted the fracking industry would crash. He told Bloomberg News it was the objective of OPEC to clean up the “marginal American oil market” and once that goal is accomplished, the price of oil will once again rise above $100 a barrel.

“The shale boom is on par with the dot-com boom,” said Fedun. “The strong players will remain, the weak ones will vanish.”

It’s likely that the larger energy companies will pick up the pieces, at pennies on the dollar, from the smaller ones that fail. These larger companies will be able to weather big swings in commodity prices and speculators will be much more cautious the second time around, making a second fracking collapse less likely.

Cheap oil also might create large changes in how the world consumes fuel, environmental analysts say. They note that when oil prices were this low last time, large gas-guzzling SUVs were de rigueur and conserving and efficiency fell down on the list of priorities. Similar increases in demand could quickly send the pendulum swinging the other way.

"If oil is high, people will burn less; that's a good a thing," Jackie Savitz, vice president for U.S. Oceans at Oceana told NPR.

Fracking as we know it is beginning to wither, ironically at the hands of the same oil markets that spawned it. But nothing lasts forever, not even gifts from Saudi kings. So when global oil production is cut or if we return to our wasteful ways, prices will recover and the fracking boom will spring back to life. Unless that is, anti-fracking activists remain vigilant and kill it first.

Two short years ago, industry analysts and television pundits were toasting North Dakota as the “Saudi Arabia of North America.” But the fracking rush that made the Peace Garden State the poster child of the U.S. energy boom has gone bust.

North Dakota’s numerous gas flares, which have been notably visible from space, are flickering out as drilling rigs shut down and tens of thousands of energy workers face reduced hours and pink slips. Small North Dakota towns recently bustling with workers and other fortune seekers are returning to the rural tranquility they once knew.

So why has fracking slipped into hibernation? Depends who you ask. Many industry analysts say fracking is a victim of its own success, helping to drive oil prices so low it was no longer affordable to frack new wells. Others point to the drop in global demand, spurred by a slowdown in the Chinese economy, alternative energies and an American public that’s not only driving more fuel-efficient cars, but driving less. Most popular, perhaps, is the theory that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, purposely sabotaged the U.S. fracking industry by maintaining its current production levels while global oil demand falls, causing prices to spiral downward.

But fracking is expensive. While much depends on geology and geography, fracking companies need to fetch prices between $55 and $100 a barrel just to break even. As the price of oil is now at $44 a barrel — and threatening to drop even further — it makes little sense to develop or even operate these sites, many run by relatively small energy companies. Meanwhile, many OPEC nations, which mostly rely on less expensive and conventional extraction methods, can still continue making profits even at $30-35 a barrel.

So, while the demise of fracking is a story of supply and demand, it is also a story about how OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia, has responded to the threat U.S. oil production presents to its preeminence in the global market. OPEC is flexing some muscle, showing the world that it’s willing to wait out a short-term plunge in prices while the thousands of Lilliputian fracking operations that challenge its dominance shut down or fail.

Roughly a third of U.S. fracking operations are now too cost prohibitive to continue, say economists. Lending to companies for fracking operations has stopped and investors may not come back even if oil prices are high enough for them to make meager profits.

“Smart people don’t invest in things that break even,” says energy expert Arthur Berman on Oilprice.com. “Why should I take a risk to make no money on an energy company when I can invest in a variable annuity or a REIT that has almost no risk that will pay me a reasonable margin? So are companies OK at current oil prices? Hell no! They are dying at these prices.”

Of course, many wells are not fracked for oil but for natural gas, but dropping prices for natural gas is affecting production in the Marcellus Shale. Wholesale natural gas prices have dropped from about $13.42 per million BTU in 2005 to about $2.85 today and are still dropping thanks to a milder than normal winter in the Northeast. At those prices, the incentive to justify further investment in fracking operations in the Marcellus Shale is vaporizing.

However, unlike with oil, natural gas fracked in Northeastern states is much less expensive to produce than natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico and Canada. So it's unlikely that currently operating wells in the shale will suffer much from falling natural gas prices.

Not even Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent decision to ban fracking in New York enticed speculators to push prices upward. New York was never going to be a big player in fracking, as the state’s available reserves in the shale are minuscule compared to West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Many companies that leased land in New York for fracking decided to pull out, as the high costs of starting up would eat away at any profit. Energy companies have become more gun shy as existing local and state-imposed limitations make nearly two-thirds of the viable land unavailable to be fracked.

Pipeline to Nowhere?

While Congress is pinning its hopes that the Keystone XL pipeline expansion will bring a jobs boom to middle America, cheap oil prices are also threatening this controversial project. The business case for building the 1,179 pipeline just isn’t there. Not only is tar-sands oil from Canada much more expensive to extract (around $74 a barrel), it's more expensive to transport, whether by rail or pipeline.

Tar-sands oil is also not attractive to refiners as it's much harder to convert into transportation fuels, so it typically sells for $20 a barrel less than the North Dakota’s Bakken Crude and $30 less per barrel than Texas crude. The State Department’s study on the Keystone XL pipeline determined that if overall oil prices dropped between $65 and $75, it would erase the profits of tar sands extraction. So at today’s even lower oil prices, it’s all but worthless today, as would be the pipeline.

However, TransCanada, the pipeline’s builders, and supporters say Keystone XL is a long-term investment and they are unfazed by commodity prices.

Some independent analysts, however, say that TransCanada is being overly optimistic and that investors won’t put up with years of losses, or even the notion that the pipeline could become a stone around the neck of TransCanada should OPEC choose to manipulate prices again. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy research says there are many questions about the viability of the pipeline.

The High Price of Low Gas Prices

While American consumers and businesses might enjoy the lower oil and natural gas prices, there is a dark side to this windfall. As shale exploration is all but dead, and most of it was funded by some $200 billion in bonds and other borrowings, there’s concern that this money will never be paid back, and such losses could lead to major adjustments, possibly even a collapse of the global financial markets similar to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the housing market bubble in 2008.

Low oil prices are already taking their toll on Alaska, which has an economy largely based on fossil-fuel extraction. While only about 20% of Alaska’s wells are fracked, oil production is even more expensive than in western Canada and in North Dakota, costing as much as $78 a barrel to produce.

Alaska has no income or sales tax and virtually funds itself from taxing crude oil. The state’s residents have become used to receiving annual checks from a $51 billion fund from these taxes. Alaska budgeted on the assumption that oil would be about $100 a barrel throughout 2015. But the state will have to dip into its rainy day fund to keep from going belly up, and investment ratings agencies say Alaska will blow through that fund quickly.

“The oil plunge caught them off guard, and now they are trying to recalibrate,” said Ted Hampton, an analyst at Moody’s Investment Services, which downgraded Alaska’s credit rating from “stable” to “negative” in December 2014.

But Alaska doesn’t seem convinced that low crude oil prices are here to stay. While drastic budget cuts and dipping into emergency funds is the plan for the next two years, the state’s acting revenue commissioner, Marcia Davis, is forecasting better days in 2017, with oil prices back to above $90 a barrel.

North Dakota doesn’t rely on funds from fossil-fuel extraction to keep the lights on in Bismarck, so it's better protected from such large swings in oil prices. Still, the loss of oil royalties, taxes on crude oil and taxes collected on oil workers will leave it several billion behind on its revenue projections this year.

The Fracking Undead

Back in November, Russian oil baron Leonid Fedun predicted the fracking industry would crash. He told Bloomberg News it was the objective of OPEC to clean up the “marginal American oil market” and once that goal is accomplished, the price of oil will once again rise above $100 a barrel.

“The shale boom is on par with the dot-com boom,” said Fedun. “The strong players will remain, the weak ones will vanish.”

It’s likely that the larger energy companies will pick up the pieces, at pennies on the dollar, from the smaller ones that fail. These larger companies will be able to weather big swings in commodity prices and speculators will be much more cautious the second time around, making a second fracking collapse less likely.

Cheap oil also might create large changes in how the world consumes fuel, environmental analysts say. They note that when oil prices were this low last time, large gas-guzzling SUVs were de rigueur and conserving and efficiency fell down on the list of priorities. Similar increases in demand could quickly send the pendulum swinging the other way.

"If oil is high, people will burn less; that's a good a thing," Jackie Savitz, vice president for U.S. Oceans at Oceana told NPR.

Fracking as we know it is beginning to wither, ironically at the hands of the same oil markets that spawned it. But nothing lasts forever, not even gifts from Saudi kings. So when global oil production is cut or if we return to our wasteful ways, prices will recover and the fracking boom will spring back to life. Unless that is, anti-fracking activists remain vigilant and kill it first.

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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/children-given-lifelong-ban-talking-about-frackingChildren Given Lifelong Ban on Talking About Frackinghttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/84145259/0/alternet_fracking~Children-Given-Lifelong-Ban-on-Talking-About-Fracking

Two Pennsylvanian children will live their lives under a gag order imposed under a $750,000 settlement.

Two young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company.

The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Corp, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.

The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged 10 and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.

The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches.

Gag orders – on adults – are typical in settlements reached between oil and gas operators and residents in the heart of shale gas boom in Pennsylvania. But the company lawyer's insistence on extending the lifetime gag order to the Hallowichs' children gave even the judge pause, according to the court documents.

The family gag order was a condition of the settlement. The couple told the court they agreed because they wanted to move to a new home away from the gas fields, and to raise their children in a safer environment. "We need to get the children out of there for their health and safety," the children's mother, Stephanie Hallowich, told the court.

She was still troubled by the gag order, however. "My concern is that they're minors. I'm not quite sure I fully understand. We know we're signing for silence for ever but how is this taking away our children's rights being minors now? I mean my daughter is turning seven today, my son is 10."

The children's father, Chris Hallowich, went on to tell the court it might be difficult to ensure the children's absolute silence on fracking – given that their ages and that the family lives in the middle of a shale gas boom.

"They're going to be among other children that are children of people within this industry and they're going to be around it every day of their life, that if they in turn say one of the illegal words when they're outside of our guardianship we're going to have difficulty controlling that," he said. "We can tell them, they can not say this, they can not say that, but if on the playground....."

The court transcripts were released in response to an open records request by thePittsburgh Post Gazette, which first reported on the children's lifetime gag order. The newspaper has been fighting for the release of all documents in the Hallowich settlement.

Campaigners say the secrecy has helped the industry resist more stringent environmental and health controls – by burying evidence of water contamination and health problems associated with natural gas operations. The Hallowichs' lawyer, Peter Villari, told the court he had never seen a gag order imposed on children in his 30 years of practicing law, according to the released transcript.

During the proceedings, the attorney representing Range Resources, James Swetz, reaffirmed the company sought the gag order on the children. "I guess our position is it does apply to the whole family. We would certainly enforce it," he told the court.

Williams Gas/Laurel Mountain Midstream and MarkWest Energy were also defendants in the case.

However, once that gag order came to light, two years after the August 2011 proceedings, the company told reporters it did not agree with Swetz's comments. "We don't believe the settlement applies to children," a Range Resources spokesman told the Gazette. He went on to tell the paper that there was no evidence that the Hallowich family was affected by exposure to gas development.

Two Pennsylvanian children will live their lives under a gag order imposed under a $750,000 settlement.

Two young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company.

The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Corp, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.

The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged 10 and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.

The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches.

Gag orders – on adults – are typical in settlements reached between oil and gas operators and residents in the heart of shale gas boom in Pennsylvania. But the company lawyer's insistence on extending the lifetime gag order to the Hallowichs' children gave even the judge pause, according to the court documents.

The family gag order was a condition of the settlement. The couple told the court they agreed because they wanted to move to a new home away from the gas fields, and to raise their children in a safer environment. "We need to get the children out of there for their health and safety," the children's mother, Stephanie Hallowich, told the court.

She was still troubled by the gag order, however. "My concern is that they're minors. I'm not quite sure I fully understand. We know we're signing for silence for ever but how is this taking away our children's rights being minors now? I mean my daughter is turning seven today, my son is 10."

The children's father, Chris Hallowich, went on to tell the court it might be difficult to ensure the children's absolute silence on fracking – given that their ages and that the family lives in the middle of a shale gas boom.

"They're going to be among other children that are children of people within this industry and they're going to be around it every day of their life, that if they in turn say one of the illegal words when they're outside of our guardianship we're going to have difficulty controlling that," he said. "We can tell them, they can not say this, they can not say that, but if on the playground....."

The court transcripts were released in response to an open records request by thePittsburgh Post Gazette, which first reported on the children's lifetime gag order. The newspaper has been fighting for the release of all documents in the Hallowich settlement.

Campaigners say the secrecy has helped the industry resist more stringent environmental and health controls – by burying evidence of water contamination and health problems associated with natural gas operations. The Hallowichs' lawyer, Peter Villari, told the court he had never seen a gag order imposed on children in his 30 years of practicing law, according to the released transcript.

During the proceedings, the attorney representing Range Resources, James Swetz, reaffirmed the company sought the gag order on the children. "I guess our position is it does apply to the whole family. We would certainly enforce it," he told the court.

Williams Gas/Laurel Mountain Midstream and MarkWest Energy were also defendants in the case.

However, once that gag order came to light, two years after the August 2011 proceedings, the company told reporters it did not agree with Swetz's comments. "We don't believe the settlement applies to children," a Range Resources spokesman told the Gazette. He went on to tell the paper that there was no evidence that the Hallowich family was affected by exposure to gas development.

A U.S. federal court has ordered a halt in proceedings until May in a case centering around oil-by-rail tankers pitting the Sierra Club and ForestEthics against the U.S.Department of Transportation (DOT). As a result, potentially explosive DOT-111 oil tank cars, dubbed “bomb trains” by activists, can continue to roll through towns and cities across the U.S. indefinitely.

“The briefing schedule previously established by the court is vacated,” wrote Chris Goelz, a mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “This appeal is stayed until May 12, 2015, or pending publication in the Federal Register of the final tank car standards and phase out of DOT-111 tank cars, whichever occurs first.”

“In a joint filing, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) contend the tank car industry doesn’t have the capacity to retrofit the estimated 143,000 tank cars that would need to be modernized to meet the new specifications,” wrote The Journal News. “Nor can manufacturers build new tank cars fast enough, they say.”

“The courts and the administration are dragging their feet on common sense safety steps that will take the most dangerous oil tanker cars off the tracks, slow down these trains, and help emergency responders prepare for accidents,” Eddie Scher, communications director for ForestEthics, told DeSmogBlog.

“We filed our lawsuit because the DOT is not moving fast enough on safety. This court's decision ignored the imminent threat to the 25 million Americans who live in the blast zone and the communities around the nation that don't have the luxury of waiting for DOTand the rail and oil industry lobbyists to finish their rule.”

A U.S. federal court has ordered a halt in proceedings until May in a case centering around oil-by-rail tankers pitting the Sierra Club and ForestEthics against the U.S.Department of Transportation (DOT). As a result, potentially explosive DOT-111 oil tank cars, dubbed “bomb trains” by activists, can continue to roll through towns and cities across the U.S. indefinitely.

“The briefing schedule previously established by the court is vacated,” wrote Chris Goelz, a mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “This appeal is stayed until May 12, 2015, or pending publication in the Federal Register of the final tank car standards and phase out of DOT-111 tank cars, whichever occurs first.”

“In a joint filing, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) contend the tank car industry doesn’t have the capacity to retrofit the estimated 143,000 tank cars that would need to be modernized to meet the new specifications,” wrote The Journal News. “Nor can manufacturers build new tank cars fast enough, they say.”

“The courts and the administration are dragging their feet on common sense safety steps that will take the most dangerous oil tanker cars off the tracks, slow down these trains, and help emergency responders prepare for accidents,” Eddie Scher, communications director for ForestEthics, told DeSmogBlog.

“We filed our lawsuit because the DOT is not moving fast enough on safety. This court's decision ignored the imminent threat to the 25 million Americans who live in the blast zone and the communities around the nation that don't have the luxury of waiting for DOTand the rail and oil industry lobbyists to finish their rule.”

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http://www.alternet.org/fracking/fracking-spill-north-dakotaRecord Spill Contaminates North Dakota River With 3 Million Gallons of Fracking Wastewaterhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/83935018/0/alternet_fracking~Record-Spill-Contaminates-North-Dakota-River-With-Million-Gallons-of-Fracking-Wastewater

The spill was reported 17 days ago when Operator Summit Midstream Partners found a toxic leak of salty drilling waste from a pipeline in the heart of the Bakken oil boom.

Officials say there’s no immediate threat to human health but as Marketplace’s Scott Tong reports yesterday, there could be trouble ahead. He interviews Duke geochemist Avner Vengosh who has sampled frack wastewater and has found that “North Dakota’s is 10 times saltier than the ocean, that endangers aquatic life and trees, and has it has ammonium and radioactive elements.”

Tong also interviewed Hannah Wiseman, law professor at Florida State, who says the disposal of fracking wastewater is underregulated.

“A typical well can spit about 1,000 gallons a day,” says Tong. “Some of the water is recycled back into fracking, stored in pits or used to de-ice roads. It’s also injected deep underground, which has been known to cause earthquakes.”

Wiseman shares that fracking wastewater issues also exist in Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.

The spill was reported 17 days ago when Operator Summit Midstream Partners found a toxic leak of salty drilling waste from a pipeline in the heart of the Bakken oil boom.

Officials say there’s no immediate threat to human health but as Marketplace’s Scott Tong reports yesterday, there could be trouble ahead. He interviews Duke geochemist Avner Vengosh who has sampled frack wastewater and has found that “North Dakota’s is 10 times saltier than the ocean, that endangers aquatic life and trees, and has it has ammonium and radioactive elements.”

Tong also interviewed Hannah Wiseman, law professor at Florida State, who says the disposal of fracking wastewater is underregulated.

“A typical well can spit about 1,000 gallons a day,” says Tong. “Some of the water is recycled back into fracking, stored in pits or used to de-ice roads. It’s also injected deep underground, which has been known to cause earthquakes.”

Wiseman shares that fracking wastewater issues also exist in Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.

Motion passed by 63 votes to 32 as Obama administration continues to oppose bill because of climate change issues

Ten Democratic senators have voted with Republicans to allow the progress of a bill to extend the Keystone oil pipeline, placing more political pressure on the White House to reconsider its proposed veto of the legislation.

The procedural motion was passed by 63 votes to 32, comfortably clearing the three-fifths majority needed to avoid a filibuster and falling just short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to overcome a presidential veto when it comes to a final vote.

But some of the Democrats, who were also joined by Maine independent Angus King, may switch votes in future to avoid embarrassing Barack Obama who has said he is opposed to Congress interfering in a long-running administration review of the pipeline extension.

The Democrats who joined senator King in voting for cloture on the motion to proceed included: Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Mark Warner of Virginia. King has said he would vote against final passage, and five senators have not voted at all yet.

Motion passed by 63 votes to 32 as Obama administration continues to oppose bill because of climate change issues

Ten Democratic senators have voted with Republicans to allow the progress of a bill to extend the Keystone oil pipeline, placing more political pressure on the White House to reconsider its proposed veto of the legislation.

The procedural motion was passed by 63 votes to 32, comfortably clearing the three-fifths majority needed to avoid a filibuster and falling just short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to overcome a presidential veto when it comes to a final vote.

But some of the Democrats, who were also joined by Maine independent Angus King, may switch votes in future to avoid embarrassing Barack Obama who has said he is opposed to Congress interfering in a long-running administration review of the pipeline extension.

The Democrats who joined senator King in voting for cloture on the motion to proceed included: Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Mark Warner of Virginia. King has said he would vote against final passage, and five senators have not voted at all yet.

Now, we learn from Nicolás Fedor Sulcic that Pope Francis is supportive of the anti-fracking movement. Watch this interview by Fernando Solanas where he met with Pope Francis soon after finishing a film about fracking in Argentina.

The movie, La Guerra del Fracking or The Fracking War, was banned in cinemas by the Argentinian government, so the filmmakers decided to post it on YouTube. We are awaiting translation of the film and then we’ll feature it on EcoWatch.

“When I was doing research for the film, every time I’d ask someone if they knew what fracking was they had no idea,” said Sulcic. The problem was that “the government didn’t call it fracking, they called it ‘non conventional gas’ so no one was making the link to what was happening in Argentina to what was happening America. I got really mad and knew something had to be done to make people aware of what was going on. I saw the website Artist Against Fracking and felt that was a very good example of what was needed to be done here to take the cause to more people rather than just environmental activists.”

With support by Peace Nobel prize Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Oscar winning Juan Jose Campanella and other very well known Argentinian intellectuals and social leaders, a website was launched to help raise awareness about the dangers of fracking Argentina.

Now, we learn from Nicolás Fedor Sulcic that Pope Francis is supportive of the anti-fracking movement. Watch this interview by Fernando Solanas where he met with Pope Francis soon after finishing a film about fracking in Argentina.

The movie, La Guerra del Fracking or The Fracking War, was banned in cinemas by the Argentinian government, so the filmmakers decided to post it on YouTube. We are awaiting translation of the film and then we’ll feature it on EcoWatch.

“When I was doing research for the film, every time I’d ask someone if they knew what fracking was they had no idea,” said Sulcic. The problem was that “the government didn’t call it fracking, they called it ‘non conventional gas’ so no one was making the link to what was happening in Argentina to what was happening America. I got really mad and knew something had to be done to make people aware of what was going on. I saw the website Artist Against Fracking and felt that was a very good example of what was needed to be done here to take the cause to more people rather than just environmental activists.”

With support by Peace Nobel prize Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Oscar winning Juan Jose Campanella and other very well known Argentinian intellectuals and social leaders, a website was launched to help raise awareness about the dangers of fracking Argentina.